Unseen Things That Do Not Die
by The Housekeeper
Summary: Her last class with McAvoy is on a Wednesday, and that night, she sits at her computer, cracks her neck back and forth a few times, takes a deep breath and writes an email to him before she can change her mind. She hits send and blows out the breath, hard, then slams her laptop screen down and tells herself to forget about it. Forget it.
1. Unseen Things That Do Not Die

_Here we were taught by men and gothic towers_

_Democracy and Faith and Righteousness_

_And love of unseen things that do not die._

––––––––––––––

"That's a terrible idea," says Sloan.

"What?"

"Asking him to have a drink. That's a terrible idea."

MacKenzie groans loudly, puts her head down on the bar, and stares morosely at what's left of her watery scotch until she catches the bartender looking at her suspiciously. She sits up again. "And how would _you_ know what a terrible idea looks like?"

Sloan shrugs and tosses back the end of her G&T. "I could either go with 'I don't,' or 'I've acted on enough of them to know.' Which would you prefer?"

MacKenzie considers. The lights are a little hazy after three drinks in the last hour and a half. Her eyelids feel pleasantly droopy and the edge of the bar is reassuringly cool and solid where she's gripping it with both hands. Dark wood, old and pitted, varnished smooth like the hull of a boat. MacKenzie wishes she had a boat, a little sailboat, maybe a day-sailer that she could take out of a marina in Massachusetts or Rhode Island. Blue jeans and a white sweater and a clear, clear sky. She's never been sailing, but she's sure she'd like it. Sailboats are sturdy, sound, traditional. Like the bar. "I like old, dependable things," she announces.

Sloan opens her mouth a little in surprise at the conversational corner that MacKenzie has turned, but clearly decides to just go with it. "It's a terrible idea," she repeats, which, okay, she might have been going to say that anyway. MacKenzie nods, the glass feeling heavy in her drunk-tired hand.

"Yes," she says, and polishes off the scotch.

––––––––––––––

She didn't _mean_ to fall for a professor. It's very cliché, and if there's anything MacKenzie strives to be, it's not-cliché. Having a crush on a professor is immature and juvenile and so, so stupid, and those are three more things that MacKenzie strives very hard not to be.

And it's humiliating, because she's never been good enough at being a real person to hide the fact that she has a crush – like a twelve-year-old-girl – on an impressively-decorated journalist. She thinks that maybe this is why she and Sloan get along so well. Sloan has trouble being a person, too. MacKenzie loves her for it.

She's thinking about this as she drops Sloan off at her dorm up-campus and makes her not-too-wobbly way south. Many of the windows she passes are open, blasting heat and repetitive music into the cool night air. Behind the diamond-paned glass, MacKenzie can see bros wearing tanks and salmon-coloured shorts, and girls in high heels and tight black dresses tugging their hems down to cover their asses, and dorm rooms lit with taped-up Christmas lights falling off the wall. It's still early, but she gives only a regretful, half-longing look at the parties. She's pretty sure that her father has an informant on the campus police force. It's the kind of thing he'd do.

She's only two entryways down from her dorm, and so busy trying to avoid a solo cup of beer that comes flying out of a second-storey window that she doesn't see the man until she walks into him, and then "Sor-" is all she gets out before she looks up and sees, in the dim light of the party above, that it's Professor McAvoy, and then she's too busy mentally cursing God and frat boys and Sloan and scotch to finish.

He had reached an arm out to steady her, but he drops it quickly when he sees her face. "McHale," he says, which startles her, because in two months of class, she's never seen a single indication that he knows her name. He usually invites students to speak by pointing.

"Professor," she says, and then, too late, "Sorry."

"That's okay," he says.

A burst of argument from the party upstairs, and the clacking hum of a clothes dryer from an open window to the basement. The air smells strongly of fabric softener and dry leaves. The silence is already awkward, and MacKenzie bursts out, "I thought you live in New York." She's pretty sure that most students don't keep track of where their professors live, and she _really _wishes she were better at being a real person.

McAvoy doesn't seem to think it's strange, though. "I do," he says. "Most of the time. I have class late on Tuesdays and early on Wednesdays, though, so…" She nods, maybe a little too enthusiastically or too many times, because his mouth quirks in amusement that he quickly tries to hide, and he asks, "You okay?"

"Yeah, sure," says MacKenzie, nodding again. "I was just with my friend at a bar, and now I'm just, you know, going home. Now." She hopes that, at some point, her mouth will once again begin to take instruction from her brain. A cool breeze rustles the leaves of the tree above her head, a linden tree with its heavy perfume. She shivers a little, chilly in her shirtsleeves, and she thinks McAvoy makes a small, aborted move forward.

"So you're a senior?"

She deflates a little. If he knows her name, he should know this, and she thinks maybe the name is just a fluke. Or her father. Probably the latter. She sighs. "A junior."

"With an early birthday?" She wishes the light were stronger. She can't read his face.

"Um," she says, cleverly, and he laughs. It's unexpected.

"I'll see you tomorrow," he says. "You finished your paper?"

"Of course," she says, because if she hadn't, Sloan would have come over, opened a bottle of white, and turned on the TV to bitch at the morons on Say Yes to the Dress while MacKenzie wrote – and MacKenzie hopes that she didn't say that out loud, because she's not supposed to tell _anyone_ that Sloan watches that show, probably not even McAvoy, who doesn't even know Sloan.

She figures she's safe when he just says, "Okay. Office hours are tomorrow at three."

"I know," she says, and then, "Wait, I don't need office hours." Office hours are for suck-ups and struggling idiots who can't hack it. People she knows have assured her that sometimes students go to office hours just to chat, but this seems strange to her. She would _never _go to office hours, no matter how much Professor McAvoy makes her melt a little when he smacks down that annoying blonde kid who wears hipster glasses. It isn't like she needs help. "Do I?"

"Goodnight, McHale," he says, walking away.

"Wait," she calls. "My father doesn't need to know about the, you know, the bar, right?"

He turns and holds his hands out, palms upward, in confusion or exasperation. "What do I look like, your mother?" He turns around again, shoving his hands in his pockets.

"I don't need office hours!" she yells, and she thinks she hears him laugh as he rounds the corner of the building and disappears.

Great. Now she needs to rewrite her paper.

––––––––––––––

The next morning dawns as crisp and yellow as the evening had promised, and Will pulls a sweater on over his Oxford and khakis for the first time all year and drinks his coffee on the balcony of his hotel room with the paper laid on the table.

He burns his tongue at page four when he sees the headline, _British Ambassador to U.N. Attacks Syria Sex Crimes_, which he needs to read three times to even parse correctly. Beneath, the paper continues, _McHale draws threats from Islamist militant groups_. He reads the article through, and then starts again at the beginning because his heart was pounding so hard the first time that the meaning of the words barely penetrated. He doesn't think the editor is much good: aside from that god-awful headline, "threats" might be an overstatement considering what the general of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria _actually_ said. It still takes his heart a good five minutes to return to normal, by which time he's late, and he has to run to make it to campus on time, yellow trees and blue sky blurring past and the cold air cutting at his throat.

Will collects their papers at the beginning of class, and a sloppy pile of pages accumulates in front of him as they pass their work down the length of the conference table. Some are coffee-stained, wrinkled, water-marked, but he's found that there's very little correlation between the state of the physical paper and its quality. Some of the best work is done at two a.m., with a cup of terrible coffee at your elbow: he knows this.

McHale isn't there. He is not, he _is not_ disappointed.

The blonde kid with fake glasses raises his hand. Will hates that kid. Not that he has favourites.

"Uh, Professor McAvoy? I forgot to print my paper. Can I email it to you?"

Will thinks about saying no. He really prefers a hard copy, something he can hold, with passages he can highlight and words he can circle, with margins on which he can splash a _Yes_, double-underlined. But he knows that it would be unreasonable, the kind of thing _he _hated when he was in school, so he sighs and says, "Fine. But do it right this second, because I'll be checking the time-stamp."

The kid's eyes go wide, and Will feels a slight moment of triumph that he knows is beneath him, and that's when McHale walks in.

She looks tired. Pale, the dark circles under her eyes like smears of bruise in contrast. She looks everywhere but at him until she notices that the only open seat is to his right. She slides into it and drops her paper on top of the stack. "Sorry," she says, quietly.

"That's okay," he says, as gently as he knows how, and launches into his lecture.

Three minutes before the end of class, he says, "That's all for today, but –" he holds up a hand to forestall the zipping of backpacks and the impossibly-loud packing of bags – "don't forget to sign up for a conference time so we can discuss your final projects. You should have a topic."

"Professor?" says McHale.

"Domestic news only," he anticipates her. They've had this discussion at least three times now. "Okay, you're done."

She lingers and he sighs. He thinks about asking her how she is, but he doesn't think she'd appreciate it. His lecture, or at least an hour of thinking about journalism, seems to have reinvigorated her a little; there's some colour in her face and her eyes gleam with determination. "Professor, I _really _think that there's good work to be done on Syria or Egypt –"

"Of course there is. But not by you," he says, "or at least not in _this_ course." He's speaking calmly, but frustration is crawling as heat along the underside of his ribcage. This is the same conversation they had last week, word for fucking word. "There is _plenty_ of unreported news here, and you can't report properly on Egypt without being _in Egypt_."

"I can go!" she insists. "Over Thanksgiving break –"

"That's four, maybe five days –"

"I'd be _good_ at it, I _know _I would –"

He smacks the table with the flat of his hand. It's unexpectedly loud, and it even surprises him, so McHale's jump is excusable. "God, McHale, we've been _over _this and _over _this. I said no. Move the fuck on." There's a short, strained pause during which he rubs a knuckle over his eyebrow and clenches his fingers to refrain from pulling a cigarette from his pocket. He didn't mean to lose his temper with her.

"Sorry," she says, utterly unconvincingly, and he's relieved that there's nothing more than righteous rage and the certainty of youth in her eyes.

He hesitates, and then, because he can't help himself, he asks, softly, "Are you okay?"

It was the wrong thing to say. Her jaw clenches so tight he's surprised that her teeth don't crack, and her mouth sets in a hard line. "Fine," she spits, and swings her bag off the table to make a dramatic exit. But her bag was open, and loose-leaf paper and two legal pads and a flurry of gum wrappers and snack packages and pencil stubs and pen caps fly all over the floor. He always thought she'd be very neat, pictured her at a desk with a cup full of carefully-sharpened pencils, but apparently not. She's looking at the mess scattered across the carpet in a mixture of resignation and misery, and she turns away from him and kneels suddenly to cover the small noise she makes, like a muffled sob.

He moves quickly, kneeling beside her to help gather up scraps of paper. "Easy," he says, and after a brief struggle with himself, puts a hand on the back of her shoulder. But she shrugs it off, grabs the trash from his hand, stuffs it in her bag and leaves before he can say anything else.

Near the trashcan, a pen cap is still rocking back and forth on the gray industrial carpet. A piece of paper stutters near to the A/C vent. He stares at it for awhile.

"Fuck," he says.

––––––––––––––

Her last class with McAvoy is on a Wednesday, and that night, she sits at her computer, cracks her neck back and forth a few times, takes a deep breath and writes an email to him before she can change her mind: _Hi Professor, I really enjoyed your class this semester and was wondering _–_ would you like to go for a drink with me to celebrate the end of classes? Cheers, MacKenzie McHale_. She hits send and blows out the breath, hard, then slams her laptop screen down and tells herself to forget about it. Forget it.

She can't. She checks her email obsessively through dinner, until Sloan smacks the smartphone right out of her hand, and MacKenzie groans and hides her face in her hands and says, "That's it. He obviously doesn't want to and I'll just have to kill myself out of shame."

"Don't do that," says Sloan, without looking up from her tiramisu.

"How can you even eat that stuff?" MacKenzie asks. The dining hall tiramisu is almost entirely whipped cream, and not even _good_ whipped cream. The kind that comes in aerosol cans.

"I'm Italian," says Sloan. "My grandmother is Italian. It makes me think of home."

"That's not even a little bit true," says MacKenzie.

"I have a healthy appetite," says Sloan.

"Okay, well, I'm going to go kill myself out of shame."

Sloan lifts her hand to wave goodbye without looking away from her bowl, but she redirects it in order to scoop up a bit of whipped cream that her fork left behind.

MacKenzie doesn't kill herself – at least, not immediately – but she does check her email five more times before bed. She turns out the light convinced that McAvoy is ignoring the request out of politeness and that she will have to resign herself to being horrendously embarrassed for the rest of her life. She considers staying in bed the next day to hide, but she goes to class anyway.

"For I am devoted to my studies and to higher learning," she tells Sloan on the phone as she walks. It's cold, really, really cold, and her fingers are numb where they're pressing the phone to her ear. "It's only one of the many things about me that are wonderful and that McAvoy will never be able to discover because he's turning down my invitation for a drink."

"Shut the fuck up," Sloan says. "Just because you scheduled yourself a nine a.m. class doesn't mean the rest of us are that stupid. God," and she hangs up. MacKenzie slips the phone into her pocket and breathes on her fingers to warm them. They tingle painfully.

She gets scolded five times by two different TAs for checking her phone during class, and when her phone buzzes at lunch, she knocks over her glass of water to get to it.

"Girl," says Sloan, forkful of salad suspended halfway to her mouth.

"I know," says MacKenzie.

"And yet you don't seem to care."

"Not so much, no."

The first word of his email is _No_, and her sternum is suddenly replaced by a vacuum, a sucking sensation in her chest. But her eyes have already moved onto the rest of the sentence, and her heart kicks on again with a _thu-thump _that's almost painful. _No, _the email says, _because I won't encourage your underage drinking habits. How about lunch instead? And not until after I've graded and handed back your final project _–_ if you still want to talk to me after that, of course_. _– WM_

MacKenzie panics. "Is he giving me a bad grade? Is that why he thinks I won't want to see him after I get my project back? Oh God, he's failing me."

"Kenzie. Get a grip."

MacKenzie straightens, breathes. "A grip. Right." She gulps some water and Sloan grabs her iPhone so that she can read the email.

"I can't believe you," she says. "You've been freaking out about this constantly, and when he emails back, you pick your final project grade to focus on?"

"Yes." She nods. "Okay. I see your point."

"I want to once again state my opinion that this is a bad idea."

"Noted."

"But you like old, dependable things."

"That's right!" MacKenzie recalls. "I do! How did you remember that?"

Sloan shrugs and finally raises her fork all the way to her mouth. "I'm a marvel," she says. "Medical professionals are wowed. That was my water you drank, by the way."

MacKenzie looks at the table, where her own water glass is lying, tipped over, in a puddle. The boy across the table and two seats down is giving her a pretty impressive glare. He's clearly frustrated that she hasn't noticed it before now. Sloan sees where MacKenzie is looking and rolls her eyes at the guy. "Oh, get over it," she snaps. MacKenzie is tapping the end of her fork against the side of her plate, frowning.

"How long does it take to grade a final project?"

"When's it due?"

"Next week, but I can get it done by tomorrow." Sloan looks at her levelly, and MacKenzie sighs. "Right. Getting a grip."

––––––––––––––

She suggests a casual place that makes a great burger (melted brie, bacon, caramelized onions, and some kind of delicious sauce – it's unthinkably decadent and delicious) and has old lacrosse sticks and photos of university sports games hung on the walls. She's late, and he's seated already when she walks in.

"Hey, McHale," he says.

"Hi, Professor." She feels incredibly awkward. She wishes she hadn't suggested this, or that he hadn't agreed to it – anything so that she wouldn't have to be standing here, trying not to blush.

He waves a hand to brush off the title and ends the motion by indicating that she should sit. "Please. It's Will."

"MacKenzie." She feels like she should be shaking his hand, as if they're meeting for the first time. The moment passes, thankfully, when the waitress comes to save her. McAvoy – Will – orders a beer, and MacKenzie eyes the draft menu wistfully, but looks up at him and orders an iced tea instead.

"Did you look at your project comments?" he asks.

"No," she says. "I figured I'd wait until after we met for lunch."

He raises his eyebrows. "I didn't think you'd be able to hold off."

He's looking at her so skeptically that she sighs and tosses her head to shift the hair away from her eyes. "Fine, I looked at them immediately. What do you want from me?"

He tries to hide a grin behind his palm. "Nothing."

"Um." She looks down at the table, picks up her fork and then puts it carefully back again in the same place. Her mother was always insistent that she not fidget. "You said some nice things. Thank you."

He waves a hand again. It seems to be a tic of his, and she wonders why she never noticed it before. "Nothing you didn't deserve."

The drinks come, and they both order burgers, though McAvoy – _Will_ – gets his with no tomato. She stirs lemon into her iced tea and looks longingly at his beer. He notices and sighs. "Go ahead," he says, opening a palm in invitation. He talks with his hands. She likes that. "_One _sip."

MacKenzie can't stop herself from smiling, hard and fast, in that stupid way she has of grinning with her whole face. He looks a little taken aback, for some reason. "Thanks," she says eagerly, sampling the beer. " 'S good. A little hoppier than I like it."

He takes back the beer, raising an eyebrow. "You have a problem, you know that?"

"It's legal in England!"

"Not an excuse, MacKenzie."

She likes the way her name sounds from his mouth, half-teasing, the hum of the M slipping into the K, clicking in his throat and knocking into the lengthened N, the Z almost an afterthought. She tries not to notice so much; he's an interesting man for other reasons, good reasons, with a Pulitzer to his name for his coverage of the first Gulf War. She rests her elbows on the table and leans towards him.

"Tell me about Baghdad," she says, and he does.

––––––––––––––

McAvoy sets down the second empty beer glass with a hard thunk. "_No_," he says, "no, you're being misguidedly optimistic again. I told you –"

"You're the one who said in lecture that the information you're looking for always exists unless you're absolutely proven otherwise," she says.

"That's different. I'm talking about optimism about events, about the world, _important _things –"

"What, everyone should just be a cynic like you?" She steals the very last fry off of his plate. They've lingered so long over the remains of their meal that she's beginning to be hungry again. The bill was paid long before – by McAvoy, of course, who looked so insulted when she tried to hand him her debit card that she didn't push the subject.

"I'm not cynical, I'm _skeptical_," he says. "There's a difference. Optimism does not, _does not_ equal patriotism. This is the main problem with cable –" He breaks off when he sees MacKenzie look away from him to follow the progress of a delicious-smelling plate of fajitas across the restaurant floor. "Want to go get an ice cream?" he asks.

"It's the middle of December."

He stands. "Come on. Ice cream doesn't have a season."

"It very much does," says MacKenzie, but she's already putting on her coat.

They argue over which of the six ice cream shops to go to as they leave the restaurant. MacKenzie is pushing for the top-your-own frozen yogurt place where you can pile on the fruit and chocolate chips and cookie dough bits and pay an exorbitant amount by weight, and McAvoy is arguing for the standard hard-scoop ice cream parlour, fifty flavours and two bucks for a cone.

"You would."

"What does that mean?" He tucks his hands into his pockets. His breath plumes out in front of him, neat and white.

"Well, you're a traditionalist. It's obvious." He splutters a little. "It's not an insult or anything. We'll rock-paper-scissors for it."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm a grown man! I don't rock-paper-scissors to make my decisions!"

"Ah," she says, sagely. "You're just afraid you're going to lose."

"Okay, McHale, you're on," he says, and stops to make an upright fist. "Best of three."

He loses.

"Next time, we go to my choice," he says.

Her heart kick-starts like a motorcycle engine at the words _next time_, but not enough for her to let the point slide. "No, that's not how it works," she says. "It was random chance. We do random chance again next time. It'll balance out eventually."

"But there are rock-paper-scissors championships! I've heard about them. If they have championships, then it can't be a game of chance entirely. Otherwise that would be stupid."

"Yes, otherwise," says MacKenzie, straight-faced.

"I'm just saying, I think you're more likely to win," he says, holding open the door to the frozen yogurt parlour. "So next time, we go to my choice."

He pays for her ice cream, too. "Thanks, Professor," she says, and then winces.

"It's _Will_," he growls. He's corrected her at least half a dozen times.

She gives a little cry of frustration. "I _can't_. It's too weird."

"I've been calling you MacKenzie."

"And is that difficult for you?"

"Not particularly. MacKenzie. See, there, I did it again."

"Well, then. You have me at a disadvantage. A feminist would say that your ability to be more more familiar with me than I am with you indicates an underlying power dynamic that –"

"I was just your professor – _anyone _would say that there's an underlying power dynamic," he grumbles. "Doesn't take a fucking feminist –"

She finishes her bite of ice cream and points at him with her spoon. "You know what you need?"

"Something to hit you over the head with?"

"A nickname! So then it will be less weird for me to use it, because it's not your real name that people call you by."

"I have a nickname. It's Will. Short for William." He pauses. "You could call me William."

"The prince is named William," MacKenzie says.

"Is that an endorsement or a dismissal?"

"Billy!"

He groans. "God, please no."

"Billy," she affirms. "Thanks for the ice cream, Billy."

"No," he says. "That is not happening. Turn the conversation right around and walk it back."

"Sure thing, Billy," she says, and he eats his frozen yogurt angrily.

They wander around, staring into the shop windows. It's cold, but she doesn't mind so much, even though she's shivering. Even the lining of her jacket is cold to the touch, and the sun is beginning to duck behind the taller buildings, light turning blue in the early winter twilight. An employee in the jewelry store is beginning to take the expensive pieces out of the window display for the night, and she stops to watch, gazing at the rings and the necklaces, pretty and delicate. Will is looking at her.

"Do you want –?" he starts, but seems to think better of whatever he's going to say. She looks at him curiously until a gust of wind makes her shiver again, and he frowns, untangling his scarf from around his neck. He hands it to her carefully, with a straight arm, as though he's afraid of getting too close. She wraps it beneath her chin, tucks the ends into her coat, and sighs in relief. It's warm from his skin and smells of wool and the easy comfort of cologne.

"Thanks, Will," she says, and the name doesn't feel awkward on her tongue.

He rocks back on his heels, still frowning, and then asks, "What are your dinner plans?"

"Um," she says.

"Because I know this great place, about fifteen or twenty minutes away, and I know students don't often get off campus, so I thought it might be nice if –"

"No, yeah," she agrees. "Yes, of course. That would be lovely." She smiles at him, the gold light of a streetlamp shining on his face and making his hair glow in the blue-gray street. He looks unsure, like a young boy.

"Great," he says. "Good."

"Let me just text my friend and tell her to get dinner without me," says MacKenzie, pulling her phone out.

"Would you like her to come?" Will asks. "There's plenty of space in the car."

MacKenzie tilts her head, considering. It wasn't what she had had in mind, but dinner with Will and Sloan sounds… nice. The way that spending time with people you really like is always nice. Like being with family.

She isn't going to think about that too much. "Sure!" she says. "Hang on. We can go pick her up at her dorm, if that's okay?" He nods, and she texts, _we're coming to pick you up for dinner_.

She's pulling open the door to Sloan's building when she gets a text back – "_We?_" – but forty seconds later, they're knocking on Sloan's door. She whips it open, sends a polite smile in Will's direction, says, "Excuse me. One moment, please," then grabs MacKenzie and pulls her into the room.

Sloan spins her around and glares. "What. Is going on right now?"

"We're going to dinner."

"Yes, and a little warning would be nice next time, but that's besides the point." MacKenzie notices that Sloan is clutching a tube of mascara and that there are three shirts laid out on the bed. She tilts her head and points at one.

"That one. You finish your mascara and I'll get you some shoes. Should I be dressed nicer?"

"He won't expect you to be – you've been with him all day." Sloan turns from her mirror and grips MacKenzie's shoulders again. "Kenzie, you've been with him _all day_."

"Yes, I know. I was there."

"Just…" Sloan breathes out heavily. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

MacKenzie tries a smile, but it's a little trembly. "Not in the slightest."

Sloan suddenly pulls her into a hug and then, just as suddenly, lets go. "Let's not keep him waiting," she says.

Three and a half minutes later, they re-emerge, MacKenzie having borrowed some of Sloan's mascara and a pair of black heels. She sees Will note the change – it would be hard for her to miss that, with the way his eyes slide down, down her legs and back up – but he doesn't say anything. Sloan, though, sees his face, his wandering eyes, and opens her mouth to comment. MacKenzie elbows her in the ribs.

"Will, this is my friend Sloan Sabbith. Sloan, Professor Will McAvoy."

"Will's fine," he says, offering his hand.

"Sure," says Sloan, and MacKenzie sees Will breathe a little sigh of relief.

"Sloan's an economics major," says MacKenzie, leading the way back outside.

"Planning to work on Wall Street?" asks Will.

"No," snaps Sloan, who MacKenzie knows is thoroughly sick of the question.

"That's what you get for coming here for your economics degree," MacKenzie reminds her.

"Sorry," says Will.

Sloan gets over it quickly, with the mercurial swing of focus at which she's so adept and which MacKenzie can never imitate. Things get stuck in her head, somehow, knocking around into each other until she becomes tired of the unchanging view of her own psychological landscape, the same thoughts in the same cold-water spin cycle. She wonders if that has anything to do with being unable to dislodge Will from her mind for the last several months, anything to do with the reason why she is here, now, walking to his car in the darkening winter night.

She insists that Sloan take the front seat, and listens as she and Will talk animatedly for the entirety of the car ride, Sloan grilling him eagerly and Will taking it with calm assurance. He's surprisingly patient, she thinks, when he wants to be; he never seemed that way in class. But he's relaxed here, one hand on the wheel with the heat blasting in the warm and slightly stuffy sedan. It's a very clean car. Her father's car was always very clean, and growing up, she thought everyone's was the same, but she's realized since coming to college that most people's vehicles are stacked full of crap in the back seat, blankets and baseball caps and manila folders and sunscreen, with a detritus of old receipts and food wrappers on the floor, drifting up like city dust against the seats and doors. She's content to sit in the warm bubble of glass and leather and steel and watch the lights speed by in the darkness, people's houses glowing outside, and feel safe.

Will opens the car door for her when they arrive, and she shivers in the blast of icy air as she steps out. The air is thin and tastes of the snow that hasn't fallen all season. Will sees the shiver, again, and raises an arm as if to wrap it around her, like a tic, a reflex he can't control, but he drops it quickly. She steps a little closer to him for the walk across the parking lot.

The restaurant is small and comfortably loud, three rooms crammed together, with interestingly-shaped bottles of colourful glass standing on every flat surface. They're seated in the back room, with a wall of windows through which MacKenzie can see the silhouettes of black tree limbs against the navy sky. Will assures them that in daylight, there's a view of a creek tinkling over rocks at the edge of the wood, and she is charmed. The menu is short and the wine list is long, and MacKenzie loves the place already.

Sloan's reading the wine list, and MacKenzie tries to catch her eye and shake her head to warn her off, but Sloan says, "Oh, Kenzie, they have that chardonnay you like!" and that's distracting enough that MacKenzie says,

"Really?" She grabs the wine list to look. "I haven't seen it anywhere but Des Ciels."

"You've been to Des Ciels?" Will asks. She blushes. It's no wonder that he's surprised, since the tasting menu there costs over a hundred dollars a plate, one-forty if you add the wine pairings, and it's not generally the kind of place that college students go. Sloan looks at her, unsure.

"My father took us," MacKenzie mutters, and Will doesn't say anything, just flags down the waitress.

"Which chardonnay?" he asks, and MacKenzie grins with her whole face again. "Just this one time," Will warns as the waitress walks away. "Because it's a special occasion."

"What occasion?"

Will's eyes widen a little in consternation, so MacKenzie saves him by saying, "End of classes. Obviously." She smiles at him again, more tempered this time, for his boy-like expression, for buying her favourite wine and sharing his beer at lunch even though he didn't really know her, for arguing with her about ice cream and handing over his scarf in the cold. "Thanks, Billy."

He colours and tries to hide it by looking hurriedly down at his menu. Across the table, Sloan mouths, "_Billy?_" and MacKenzie shrugs and tries not to smile.

They end up ordering a second bottle and drinking most of it, so MacKenzie's limbs are pleasantly heavy when they stand to put on scarves and button coats and struggle into gloves. She points at the bathroom. "If you don't mind…"

"I'll go warm up the car," says Will, and Sloan follows her into the bathroom.

"Jesus, Kenzie," she says.

"I really like him," MacKenzie says. "Really a lot."

"He's old."

"He's in his mid-thirties!"

"Are you going to sleep with him?"

MacKenzie huffs and leans against the wall. "It's a bit early to be thinking about that, don't you think?"

"Please," says Sloan. "I'm not other people. Are you going to sleep with him?"

"I haven't decided yet."

There's silence for a moment, and MacKenzie can see Sloan sifting through responses and throwing them out, one by one. Finally, she sighs. "I know you know," she says, "But I'm going to remind you anyway that he could be fired, you could be a joke for your entire career, and –"

"No one will –"

"– _and_," Sloan holds up a hand to forestall her, "you could get your heart broken." MacKenzie snorts. "Kenzie, he's thirty-something and you like him really a lot."

MacKenzie smiles a little and scuffs her toe along the floor. "I really do," she says.

Sloan stares at her for another moment and then jerks her head at the stalls. "Go on," she says.

Outside, it has started, finally, to snow, and the car's headlights catch flakes falling thick and fast, like tiny moths or white fireflies. The car is almost warm, and MacKenzie ducks her nose down into the collar of her coat and fumbles with the seat belt. She rests her head against the cold window, her breath fogging the glass and glittering like a Fourth-of-July sparkler when a streetlight slides past. The wine is heavy in her veins and she thinks she can hear her blood rushing around, like there's a sea inside of her. Sloan is quiet, and Will presses the radio on, turning it down to a low, staticky hum, and MacKenzie closes her eyes and feels the road singing along beneath them.

Will parks on the street, and they walk with Sloan to her building. As she disappears through the door, she gives Will a little wave and MacKenzie a long look that MacKenzie knows is supposed to be meaningful but that she can't quite figure out the meaning of. She pauses, then turns to Will.

"Thanks," she says. "I had a good time today." She looks at his face and then finds that she can't, so she looks down at her feet instead, at the way snowflakes are piling up against the heels she borrowed from Sloan. Her toes are incredibly cold. Will lays a gloved hand on her shoulder, and she's surprised into looking into his face again. It's impossible to read. Maybe if she knew him better – but she doesn't; she's only known him, really, for a few hours, and she cannot read the currents under his face, and anyway, people with all their complicated thoughts and feelings and histories, with their own worlds inside of them, have always been to her a book that she cannot open.

"Come on," he says. "I'll walk you home."

They're quiet, following the gentle slope of campus downwards. Snow is catching in Will's hair, sparking in the streetlights the same way that sunlight glitters off a lake in high summer. He is reassuringly solid beside her, and he follows her to the door of her building. She stares at the wooden door, the entryway number painted in gilt beside it, and then turns to face him.

"Would you like to come up? I have hot chocolate, and milk that hasn't even expired."

"We shouldn't," says Will, and she looks away, because it isn't like she doesn't know that.

"Yeah, no, sure," she says, staring at the linden tree under which she once bumped into him. It's bare now, with snow dusting its bark. She doesn't move. Neither does he. She tries not to hope too hard. "Oh, why not?" she bursts out. "Why not? You're no longer my professor. Just hot chocolate."

"MacKenzie," he begins, and lifts a hand to cup her face. She tries not to lean into it, tries not to close her eyes, but it's a battle lost from the start. She lifts a hand and places it on his chest, on the V where his coat lapels leave his sweater exposed because she's still wearing his scarf. His heart flutters under her hand like the wings of a trapped moth or a paper crane against her palm.

"I know," she says. "But, please, just –" She can't say it; she is too shy or too embarrassed or too young, or else she doesn't want it enough – but that can in no way be true, because her blood is pressing up against her ears with how badly she wants him. In the end, it doesn't matter, because when she fists her hand into his sweater and makes a frustrated sound, he grabs her elbows and pulls her to him and kisses her sweetly, warmly, their breath pluming out through their noses and snowflakes melting on their faces. She kisses him back, trying to remember it, trying to make it good, this one and only kiss she will ever get with him. His lips are soft and taste of wine, and he is so warm that she can't help the little sound she makes when he lets her go, the sound of something being broken or lost.

"Goodnight, MacKenzie," he says, his voice rough, and she nods and faces the door so that she doesn't see him walk away through the snow. She's still staring at it, trying to remember what she's supposed to do with the wood and metal, with the hinge and handle, when his footsteps stop a few yards away.

"I'm teaching a grad seminar next semester," he says. "Four, maybe five students. On international journalism. We'll go abroad during spring break." He pauses. "You could petition the department for permission to enrol."

She makes an effort not to spin around quickly, and it _is_ an effort, to turn her head, her body, to take a tiny pivot step with her right foot. "_Will_," she says.

He makes his hand-waving gesture, that tic of his, and her chest expands so quickly that it's like her heart and lungs exploded. She breathes deep, forces herself to ask, "Is this a good idea?"

He shakes his head. "No," he says. He is not smiling.

"Okay, then," she says. "I'll see you after the holiday."

He nods, still somber, and walks away. She wants, badly, to call him back, to say – something, to say _something_, to make him come upstairs so that they can drink hot chocolate and watch the snow fall outside her window. He rounds the corner and is gone.

––––––––––––––

Will spends the winter break with three bottles of Scotch and an old typewriter. He keeps busy; he is writing a book, planning his classes, filing paperwork with the department so that he can take next semester's students overseas. On Christmas Eve, he talks to his sister, apologizes unconvincingly for staying on the East Coast, fails to sleep, and takes a long walk through the city thinking of nothing until the sky is turning pink over the silent Midtown buildings, reflected in the lidless windows of banks and corporate headquarters. He doesn't dwell on anything.

On January 2, the heat in his apartment stutters and dies. He spends one night, shivering, beneath three blankets, and in the morning he calls his landlord, throws some clothes into a suitcase, and books a room at the hotel near campus. The university is deserted and peaceful, snow lying undisturbed over the quads and piled into blue heaps on bicycle seats. He chain-smokes cigarettes. He sits in his office and writes, and writes.

He cannot stop thinking of her. He tries very hard not to notice.

On the first day of class, he arrives early. There are four graduate students, and three of them arrive before she walks through the door. He smiles in relief and welcome. "Mac – Hale," he corrects himself. "Glad you could make it."

"I'm not officially enrolled," she says, standing just inside the door and gripping the strap of her bag tightly at her shoulder. "The department hasn't given me permission yet, but I didn't want to miss…" She trails off, looking around at the grad students, who are displaying the familiar expression of distaste that they wear whenever forced to interact with undergraduates. Will hates grad students almost as much as he hates undergrads. His feelings really just depend on which he's teaching during any given semester.

"That's fine," he says. "Come on in. Have a seat."

Will is always frustrated by the necessities of the first class: going over the syllabus as if his students can't read, waiting to hear everyone's names and departments. There are two grad students in the journalism department, one in international relations, and one in political science. They all introduce their thesis or dissertation topics unprompted, speaking about abstract concepts with confidence and opaque jargon. MacKenzie is looking more cowed by the moment. Will _really _hates grad students.

"I'm MacKenzie McHale," she says. "I'm a junior in the journalism department."

The political science guy snorts, not even trying to hide it, and MacKenzie sinks down a little in her seat. The girl from the IR department leans forward and says, "You're British. McHale? Like Ambassador McHale?"

MacKenzie stares at her hands, gripping the edge of the table so hard that the joints are white.

"Let's start," says Will.

He ends class ten minutes early, and MacKenzie is up and almost through the door before he gets his final word out.

"Oh, wait!" he calls, and she pauses and turns back, face set and nervous. "I forgot to say – we're going abroad during spring break for some practical experience, as you know. You'll all write your final project on what we see and do there. I'm open to suggestions, _but_ –" he holds up a hand, "the university will not allow us to go anywhere dangerous. No Iraq, no Egypt, no Syria." He very carefully does not look at MacKenzie, even though he can feel her eyes on him, on his face and mouth and throat.

"What about somewhere like the Central African Republic?" she asks, no longer nervous or embarrassed, and then he does look at her, and smile. He has a suspicion that his smile is overly fond, so he quickly drops it and goes to shuffle his papers instead. It's the first class: he doesn't have any papers to shuffle.

"I say 'not dangerous' and the first place you pick is a country in the control of rebels, largely foreign ones, with no functioning government. You and I have very different definitions of dangerous." He risks a glance up. She's quirking her mouth at him. "Alright, you guys can go now."

He catches MacKenzie's eye, and she steps out of the doorway and pretends to look through her bag until the grad students clear out. "I'll call the department head for you," he says. "Get you official permission to be here."

"Thanks," she says. "I wanted to go to Syria."

"I know. Did you think that there was any possible way that would happen?"

"Not really," she says, and they smile a little stupidly at each other. "I take it even Tunisia is out?" He snorts. "What about Mali? They just had an election. Or Namibia."

"Namibia," he repeats.

"They're having their worst drought in over thirty years. The government has promised relief to the rural villages, but in many cases, nothing has come of it, and even when they do deliver, it isn't enough. There's no food, no water. People are down to a meal a day, if that."

Will feels his heartbeat quicken, the way it does when there's something real to do, the way it never does when he's teaching. "Namibia," he says again, and she smiles.

That night, he leaves a voicemail message each for the department head and secretary, and then he emails MacKenzie: _I called the department administrators. Let me know when you're official. _He adds, _It was good to see you_, and then deletes it, and then adds it back in and stares it it for a minute. "Fuck it," he says, and clicks send.

She emails back almost immediately: _You too, Billy_, and he wakes up the following morning thinking of the quirk of her lips and the soft curve where her side melts into her hips.

She's on his class list by the following Tuesday, which is the same day that Will leaves the building ten minutes after class to find his four grad students in a clump outside, two of them smoking, and one of them muttering, "…with that fucking undergrad. I bet her daddy got her in."

"Hey!" he says sharply, probably much too loud; they jump. "McHale was approved to take this class by the department, and I'm the one who suggested it to her, because I know the quality of work she can do – which is more than I can say for any of you. I don't want to hear talk like that in my classes. If you have a problem, you take it up with me or with the department chair, understand?" They nod, say nothing. The IR girl's eyes are wide in her pale face. Will knows that when he gets angry, he yells and looms over people, and the girl is barely five-two. He must have scared her. He sighs, forces his shoulders to relax. "Good. See you on Thursday."

It felt good to yell at them, but he thinks as he walks away across the plaza that he should have stayed silent: he is giving himself away. He worries for a week, then for another one, and still nothing happens except that the grad students become nicer to MacKenzie, though whether it's because they took his reproach to heart or because they're pretending for his sake, he isn't sure. He thinks MacKenzie herself may have something to do with it: her questions are always sharp, constantly pushing him to go deeper into the material, and she's clearly well-informed.

The grad students aren't bad, it turns out: the poli sci Ph.D. candidate, Reese, is kind of an asshole, but Gary and Kendra, the journalism students, are polite and engaged, and the IR girl, Tess, is bright and sweet and treats MacKenzie as an equal. One morning, as Will is pulling out their graded assignments to hand back, she breaks off talking with Gary and Kendra to smile at MacKenzie as she walks in, and says, "Hey, McHale, we were going to go out for lunch after class. Want to come?" Across, the table, Reese rolls his eyes, and Tess says, "Hey, go fuck yourself." When MacKenzie breaks into the biggest smile she's worn all semester, Will has to remind himself not to scratch out the B- on Tess's paper and replace it with an A.

He spends the weekends in February calling every journalist he still considers a friend and asking them who's in Namibia. He arranges meetings and tag-alongs and site visits. He reminds his students to ensure their passports haven't expired. He calls the American embassy in Windhoek and submits budget revision after budget revision to the department until one is accepted. He starts to call MacKenzie by her first name so many times that after awhile, he just leaves it at "Mac," so the grad students think that he's too lazy to say McHale but MacKenzie knows that he's calling her by her first name. She gives him a little smile every time he does it and begins to write _Hi Billy _at the top of every assignment.

February is three weeks of deep, snowless freeze that bursts into an early spring. The bare trees look out of place against the mild blue sky, and Will walks to class in just a sweater and sport coat. Students in hoodies read on the lawns and throw footballs between the buildings.

A week and a half before they leave for Africa, MacKenzie gets to class early, phone pressed to her ear. "Sure, thanks," she says. "I have to go now, Daddy, I have class. You too." She laughs. "I say hi back. Okay, bye." She pulls a chair out for herself.

"How's your father doing?" Will asks.

"Good. He just called to say happy birthday."

"It's your birthday?" MacKenzie is clearly trying not to smile. "Happy birthday!"

Kendra, following Reese in the door, says, "Hey, cool, happy birthday."

"So you're, what, twenty-one?" asks Will, even though he knows. MacKenzie nods. "So you're legal now."

"In every way," she says, holding his gaze, and he is forced to look down and move his papers around in an entirely unnecessary way.

After class, he says, "Mac, hold up a minute. We have to talk logistics about the trip, because you're an undergrad."

She settles back into her seat, two down from his. "What's up?" she says.

Will brushes off the question with a wave of his hand. "You have to sign a thing. It's no big deal. I'll bring it next class. What are you doing for your birthday?"

She shrugs. "Nothing big. Sloan and I were going to go out after dinner to a bar or something. Low-key, you know?"

"Don't be ridiculous," Will hears himself say, as he tries to catch his brain up to his mouth. "You're twenty-one. I'll take you guys out to Des Ciels."

"Will, you don't have to –"

"I want to," he says, which is true. "If you'd like to come."

She reaches forward as if to grab his hand where he's fiddling with the latch of his briefcase, clicking it up and down on the table, but she seems to think better of it. "I'd love to," she says. "Pick us up outside my dorm? Seven o'clock?"

He nods, and she grins at him and leaves. He stares at the latch of his briefcase, which is suspended halfway between open and locked.

"I'm an idiot," he tells it, and it snaps shut.

––––––––––––––

"No," says Sloan, "the last one was better. You can wear those sexy red heels with it."

"I love those shoes," says MacKenzie, pulling the dress back over her head and struggling into the previous one. "They make my legs look about a million miles long. Zip me up?" She lifts her hair and Sloan climbs off the bed to help her. They both survey the result in the mirror.

"Good," says Sloan. "Hair?"

"Down?"

"Solid. Curl it a bit, maybe."

"Yeah." MacKenzie opens a drawer to get the curler and plugs it in.

"Are you going to sleep with him this time?" Sloan leans against the wall, eyes sharp beneath their blackened lashes.

"I don't think he'll let me," says MacKenzie.

"He likes you, though."

It isn't a question, but MacKenzie says, "Yeah," and holds her hand above the curling iron to check if it's hot.

"Well, then."

"Well, then _what_? He won't sleep with me. He's too goddamn noble."

"You always go for the noble ones."

"Better than the ones you go for," snaps MacKenzie. It's a low blow, but Sloan just looks as though she's considering it seriously, and then nods soberly.

"That's fair."

"Sorry." They're quiet as MacKenzie twirls some hair, holds it, releases. Twirl, hold, release. She's careful not to burn herself, which she's done at least seven times while doing this. She's not as clumsy as she was when she was younger – she was one of those eleven year olds who could walk into a room and somehow break something on the other side of it – but she's enough of a klutz that she has to focus very hard whenever she sets out her mother's good china for Easter dinner, and her fingers more often than not sport band-aids to cover minor burns and scrapes and splinters.

"I'd sleep with you, if I were him."

"I find that not at all reassuring," says MacKenzie, setting down the hair curler. She faces Sloan. "Good?"

"Great."

"Come on then, we're already ten minutes late."

"That's practically early for you," says Sloan, grabbing her purse.

Will is leaning against the building, scrolling through something on his phone. MacKenzie gets the feeling that he's not actually reading anything; the phone is clearly just a prop to avoid standing around awkwardly with his hands in his pockets in front of an undergraduate dorm. He's wearing a charcoal suit, blue-and-gray striped tie, and, she can see because his feet are kicked out in front of him, one black sock and one brown. "You look nice," she says.

Will looks up startled, and starts, "You do –" and then he stops, staring at her, and MacKenzie can see Sloan give her a smug smile. Will clears his throat. "Uh, you look very nice." He tears his eyes away. "Hey, Sloan."

"Hey, Will," she says, trying not to laugh, and when Will gives a little amused snort of breath and offers Sloan his arm, MacKenzie doesn't begrudge her at all.

At the restaurant, once the maitre d' has shown them to their table and has been forced to pull out a chair for Sloan because Will got to MacKenzie's first, she says, "I forgot about the chairs here." They're Louis XVI-style, oval-backed monstrosities upholstered in velvet, completely and utterly pompous. She loves it.

"Champagne," says Will. "Any preference?"

MacKenzie and Sloan shake their heads – the only champagne they drink is the swill they can get on campus, sparkling wine for three dollars a bottle. Sloan has a line of empties under her window and sometimes buys flowers to put in them so she doesn't look like an alcoholic.

He orders the third-most expensive champagne on the menu, which they're two-thirds of the way through by the time the appetizer arrives: the best ceviche MacKenzie has ever eaten, served in a giant martini glass. She takes a bite and closes her eyes in pleasure. "I love food," she says.

"Hey, I think this martini glass is crystal," says Sloan.

"My ancestors were crystal-smiths," says Will. "In Scotland."

"Oh, so you know all about crystal?" asks Sloan.

"Not even a little bit," Will says, "but I _am_ related to Robert Bruce," and he pours them all more champagne.

MacKenzie's risotto is impossibly good, but Will's duck looks even better. He sees her eyeing it, sighs, and pushes the plate towards her. "Thanks," she says, spearing a slice with her fork.

"Sure," he says, as she takes a bite. Her eyes widen in amazement, and he shakes his head, switches their plates, and flags down a waiter to order another bottle of champagne.

By the time they finish it, it's ten-fifteen and too early to call it quits. "I want dessert," says MacKenzie. "Is there crème brûlée?"

"Of course there's crème brûlée," says Will. It comes with three blackberries, a gooseberry, a sprig of mint, and three glasses of brandy that Will managed to order without MacKenzie noticing. She eats the fruit before breaking through the caramelized crust. Will watches her with amusement.

"It's a balanced diet," she explains, and he looks at her without smiling over the rim of his brandy glass.

As they leave the restaurant, Sloan says, "Kenzie, you have to do shots. It's your twenty-first – you have to do shots."

"Just one," she says. "There was the champagne and the brandy."

"That karaoke bar by the liquor store has a good specials menu," says Sloan.

"Just _one_," says MacKenzie, who, to her own surprise, is in fact able to get away with having only one. It's an expensive tequila that tastes just as terrible as the cheap stuff, but she likes the process of a tequila shot: salt on her fingers, lick it off, throw back the shot, bite the lemon. There's a rhythm to it, a ritual, like how you say the same things at church each week. Will smiles when she makes a face at the liquor, and she tries not to watch him lick the rest of the salt from his knuckles.

It's one-thirty before she and Will drop Sloan off. "You okay with her?" Sloan asks Will, because MacKenzie is just drunk enough to have to watch her feet so that she doesn't trip over her heels.

"Sure," says Will, and when Sloan disappears, he puts his arm around her shoulders and leads her south.

"I'm fine," says MacKenzie.

"I know," says Will. His voice is warm, low and deep when her ear is this close to his chest, and she sighs and rests her head against him. They stop in front of her door.

"Are you going to be okay driving back to the city?" she asks. She doesn't like the thought of him, tired and a little drunk, speeding down the dark highway at two in the morning.

He shakes his head. "I took the train this morning. I think I missed the last one out. I'll just go to the hotel, get a room for a few hours."

"Stay here," she suggests instantly, and isn't even sorry about it.

"No," he says. "Absolutely not. I can't."

"I have a single room," she says. "And I put a queen bed in it."

"The size of your bed is _so_ not the dominant issue, here," says Will.

"Come on, Billy," she says. She hasn't called him that all night, and she sees him squeeze his eyes shut, which is all the warning she gets before he presses her up against the stone wall of her dorm and kisses her, pressing himself to her with his hand cushioning the back of her head. She moans, the bottom of her stomach dropping out and out and out, her thigh crushed against his, and she opens her mouth to him; he breathes, jaggedly, and kisses her again, and again, until she is weak and clinging to him and he breaks away to rest his forehead against the cool stone.

"I _can't_," he says. "You see? I can't. I can't."

"All right," she says, "all right," and she cups his face and caresses his cheekbone with her thumb until he comes back to her a little.

He straightens and smiles at her, catching her hand against his face and kissing her fingers. "Happy birthday, MacKenzie," he says, drops her hand, and walks away.

––––––––––––––

Sloan helps her pack, for values of "help" meaning "sprawl on the bed while MacKenzie throws things into a pile next to her."

"What are you taking?" Sloan asks.

"As little as possible," says MacKenzie. "I think journalists travel light." What she _actually _thinks is that she tends to pack a giant suitcase full of clothes and shoes and hair products, and she knows that Will and the grad students will make fun of her if she does. She just likes to be prepared, is all.

"Are you taking Simon?" asks Sloan, reaching behind her back to pull MacKenzie's ancient stuffed bear out from beneath her pillow.

"No," says MacKenzie, and then looks at Simon. "Sorry, buddy."

"It's ridiculous that you talk to him like that."

"It's ridiculous that your _face_ looks the way it does," says MacKenzie, and Sloan throws a shirt at her.

They fly from Newark to Johannesburg and then lounge around the airport for three hours waiting for their connection. MacKenzie barely sleeps on the trans-Atlantic flight, too keyed up, too nervous, too close to the back of the plane. Will, two rows in front of her in the aisle seat, is out pretty much the whole time. She watches two movies and three episodes of Seinfeld, and she hates Seinfeld, but even now, lying across three seats at the gate in Johannesburg, she has only closed her eyes for a few minutes when her body shakes itself awake again. Will is in the seat next to her head.

"The grad students went to get food," he says, and she lifts her head, lays it on his thigh, and closes her eyes again.

Around noon, they land in Windhoek and share a minivan cab to the hotel. They step out of it, wrestling with their bags, into what feels like sweltering heat and a overflow of humanity, all yelling and jostling each other on the street. Only because she is standing right next to Will can she see him frown, feel him tense up.

"What's wrong?" she asks, quietly, and he shakes his head.

"Nothing," he says, but she sees the way his eyes skid up and down the sidewalk, the way he walks close to her, and when she struggles to lift the wheels of her small bag out of a crack in the pavement, he takes it from her and jerks his head at the hotel door. "Get inside," he says.

In the lobby, he checks in and hands out keys. "Gary and Reese, two-twenty-seven," he says. "Girls, two-thirty-four. One of you is on a cot. Sorry." He directs it at MacKenzie, who will clearly be the one on the cot, and she shrugs equably. He is careful to look away before saying, "I'm in two-thirty-five if anyone needs me. Drop your stuff off and meet back here. Fifteen minutes."

She turns towards the elevator, but he doesn't follow; when she looks back, he is gazing through the window at the street, still frowning.

––––––––––––––

It's fine for the first six days.

That first afternoon, they meet up with one of Will's old friends, Terry, who is freelancing for the BBC. Terry greets him with a warm, back-slapping hug, walks them around the city for awhile, and lets the students tag along to his interviews with some foreign aid workers, who are beginning to arrive in serious numbers. Aid workers, Will has always thought, can smell when blood is in the water just as well as any shark, though the aid workers are (for the most part) considerably better-intentioned. It's late, afterwards, and Terry takes them to dinner. They eat outside as darkness seeps up from the horizon. The heat is beginning to ease, air heading towards cool; the mercury is supposed to dip as low as thirteen Celsius overnight. They linger, and Will lets the students talk, watching MacKenzie lean over the table to argue with Kendra, eyes bright and hair hanging forward as she gestures emphatically.

Terry scrapes his seat backwards, setting his feet on a nearby chair. Will pulls a cigarette and offers him one, and then the lighter, gazing at the people passing on the street. Windows are lit, and the sidewalks are busy, women in bright dresses and men in business suits. It's a nice area of the city, corporate offices with burnished sides glowing in the reflection of the street lamps. Two teenagers stop in front of the restaurant, boys with sloppy smiles. One punches the other on the arm, and they laugh. He can't tell what language they are speaking. Will almost forgets to feel ill at ease, but he knows too well the hum of a country in which something is about to happen, and his skin is itchy in a way that has nothing to do with the sweat drying cool under his collar. He takes a long drag on his cigarette and rests his head against the back of his chair to watch the smoke rise into the dark sky.

"How are things?" asks Terry.

"You know," says Will. "Academia."

"Ever think about getting back out there?" asks Terry, and Will has to breathe through a sudden surge of desire to be back on the street, him and a notepad and a dusty country, no students or papers or department chairs. Breathes. MacKenzie looks over at him, although she is too far away to hear.

"Every day," he says. "Every fucking day."

"No one keeping you at home?"

Will hesitates. "No," he says, and there's no reason that it should sound so much like a lie. Terry smiles at him with a little too much sympathy and orders them both a drink.

They spend the next three days in any village within reasonable driving distance, waiting, cold and without coffee, at bus stops in the shivery pre-dawn and dragging themselves into the hotel just before midnight. Will watches the circles under MacKenzie's eyes darken each morning. The days would be exhausting even after a long sleep and a leisurely breakfast: there is poverty here, dust and little food – and these are the villages within range of help. The elderly watch them with sunken eyes, faces craggy like the side of a cliff where an unwary ship might wreck itself; once, a child clings to Kendra's legs until his mother comes to take him away. On the third day, they meet a seventeen-year-old mother of two who is eating dirt to keep herself alive, and only because he is watching for it is he able to see the way MacKenzie's tired face crumples before she takes a deep breath and smiles for the girl.

She doesn't eat dinner that night, though she does order a drink, and then another one. She's flagging the waiter over to request a third when Will taps her arm and shakes his head at her slowly. When they straggle into the hotel that night, he says, "Mac," quietly, and she stops without turning to look at him.

"I'm pretty tired, Professor," she says. "We've all had a long few days."

He hears the stress on _all_ and thinks that maybe he has done her no favours, noticing her face and no one else's. He pauses. "Sleep well," he says, and she nods jerkily and leaves.

He has scheduled them several interviews with government officials, hoping that their time in the villages would make them sharper with the bureaucrats, less willing to take excuses. It works so well that after the second interview, he has to remind them to make some kind of connection with their interview subject. The sessions are a little bit of a mess, anyway: each of his kids has managed to pick a different aspect of the crisis on which to focus, and the officials are forced to answer first a spate of questions about water-delivery infrastructure and then a set of jabbing leads about archival record-keeping.

Reluctantly, Will gives them some free time to wander the city, maximum two hours at a time in case of emergencies. They spend their nights in the hotel lounge, the students typing furiously on their laptops while he sips scotch and soda and then goes to bed early. It would be enjoyable, for the most part, except for that itch under his skin, the way he can only half-listen to any conversation taking place outside because his ears are tuned to the timbre of the crowd, its swells and breaks and silences. Still, it's not until their last night that Terry calls, voice tight, and says,

"Get out."

Will kills the call without responding and says, "Everyone get packed, right now. Meet in the lobby in five minutes, no more than seven. Just throw everything in your bag." They stare at him, unblinking. "Do it now," he says, and they stand, frantically slamming their laptops closed and ripping their power cords from the outlets. He looks at them: there are only four.

"Tess, tell Mac," he says, and then takes the stairs two at a time.

He's dumping an armload of all of his toiletries loose into his rucksack when he hears the door across the hall open, close, and open again. Someone hammers on his door frantically. It's Tess, looking terrified. "McHale's not in the room," she says.

"Fuck," he says. "Fuck, fuck –" he holds the door open with his foot, drags over his now-packed rucksack and zips it closed as he hands it to her. "Pack her stuff, all of it." She nods and turns to go, but he stops her. "Tess, listen. Listen to me. Take my stuff, take Mac's stuff, get the boys. You're going to the American embassy. It's three blocks away, you'll be fine. Get inside and wait for me there." He hesitates. "If Reese gives you a hard time, tell him that I'll fail him, and then I'll tell every professor at his dissertation defence to fail him. Got it?" She nods. "Go."

He calls the embassy, warning them to expect four grad students; they think he's crazy, or at least whoever takes his call does. Will doesn't care. There's someone taking calls at nine o'clock on a Friday, which means that someone higher up at State probably does _not _think he's crazy.

On the off-chance that MacKenzie brought her cell phone, and it's on, _and _it can accept calls in Namibia, he calls the office of the Dean of Undergraduates and requests her personal number. They refuse to give it to him for so long that Will is wondering whether he can call up the UN and ask to speak to the British ambassador without being laughed off the line by the time they finally agree to give him her cell number. He dials, and wishes that he still prayed. It used to be nice, as a boy, kneeling beside his bed and believing, believing that in the morning, the world might not be quite the same.

It rings, which is a good sign, and when she picks up, he has to hang his head between his knees for a moment because he's light-headed. "Hello?" she asks.

"MacKenzie, _where are you_?"

"At the high school," she says. "It's no big deal, I figured since it's our last night –"

"Don't move," he says. "Don't fucking move," and he hangs up.

It's close, though not as close as he was hoping, and he runs, weaving through people, his leather shoes squeaking. He's not dressed as a journalist – he's dressed as a professor, and he curses himself. He misses the presence of a pen in his breast pocket, jeans and a canvas shirt, and no one in the country who knows him.

She's sitting outside the school on the hood of a parked car, talking rapidly in French to a group of teenagers. She's clearly telling a story, her hands much more vocal in French than they are in English, and the teenagers are laughing at her, the girls throwing their heads back and the boys doubling over. One of them punches her lightly on the arm, and she smiles, pleased.

Will waits until his breathing has slowed, until the dusty air no longer tastes like copper in his throat, and then walks over. It's hard to be casual, but he doesn't want questions, and he doesn't want to scare them, any of them. "Hey guys," he says to the teens. "Sorry, but I have to steal her away." They groan and jabber at her in French, and she apologizes and shakes all the hands thrust her way, disentangling herself and walking with him out of earshot.

Her father raised no fool. She walks fast, face serious. They've gone a few blocks before she asks, "What's wrong?" and he shakes his head, but that's when the dull murmur of the city raises itself to a roar. Farther down Independence Avenue, there is a surging of bodies yelling, marching north from the industrial park and the maze of houses that creep around its edges. Will grabs MacKenzie's arm.

"Will, what is it?" She stumbles and he nearly lifts her off her feet by the arm. He can feel her bones under her skin, the gap between radius and ulna, and he knows he's leaving bruises but can't let go. "What's happening?"

"Food riot," says Will, turns onto a side road, and pulls her into a run.

"We're not going to the hotel?" MacKenzie asks.

"Embassy," he says, and she runs faster. The crowd had almost been at the traffic circle across from the embassy, but the front door is on Lossen, not Independence, and if they can just get there, in only a block and a half –

They almost run into the three guys on the sidewalk, big guys. One has a baseball bat, and one is holding a piece of pipe. The third has an AK. He raises it.

"_Pardon_," says MacKenzie, "_pardon_," and begins to babble in French too fast for Will to follow. He watches the three guys instead. They look uncertain, and then MacKenzie says something that makes one twist into a grimace of a smile. He has a nasty scar that turns his top lip up on the left side so that he looks like he's sneering. The three of them smell strongly of sweat and factory grease. MacKenzie pauses, answers a question, and the barrel of the AK begins to sag a little until the guy holding it jerks his head down the street and says, "_Allons-y_. Go."

Will pushes MacKenzie forward, his hand between her shoulder blades. "What did you tell them?"

"That I'm a French university student and you're my idiot American boyfriend who can't speak any other languages."

"I can speak Spanish!" says Will, although he knows that's not the point. "And conversational German. Also Latin."

"Bet the Latin's useful when you run into Cicero and his thugs," says MacKenzie, and she takes her eyes off the pavement to grin and him and promptly catches her toe on an uneven patch. Will hooks his arm around her middle and sets her upright. The crowd is loud, now, a block away at most, and groups of people are beginning to break off and turn down Lossen.

"Come on," he says, and catches at her hand to sprint for the embassy. At the gate, he waves his passport and they're inside.

It's chaos, filled with Namibians and Americans and shouting officials. The grad students are sitting on their suitcases in one corner, not speaking. Tess cries out in relief when she sees them, and Gary slaps MacKenzie on the back.

Will takes one look at the lines, the crowd, the understaffed windows, and pulls out his phone. He's not messing around: he goes straight for Charlie Skinner at ACN. "Charlie," he says, "it's Will. Who do you know at State?"

––––––––––––––

Forty-five minutes later, he hangs up and drops his head, scrubbing his hand over the back of his neck.

"Well," he says, making himself look at his students. "They can get us on an evacuation flight on Monday." Monday's not good enough. He's not sticking around for two days – by then, there's no way that the evac flight will make it off the ground. He looks at MacKenzie.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry to ask."

She shakes her head. "It's okay. I'll call him." He turns his head away and she says, "B–" and cuts herself off. "Hey," she says instead. "Really. I promise." When he nods, she dials, pauses, says, "Hey, Dad. No, no, I'm fine. But, listen…" She wanders away a few steps and he stops watching her until she comes back and taps his arm. "He wants to talk to you."

Will takes the phone with some trepidation, but his desire to not disappoint or anger the ambassador (because he's a British ambassador, powerful, with the ability to make trouble for the university, and _not_ because he's Mac's father) is so not important. "Sir," he says.

"Mr. McAvoy?"

"Yes, sir. Listen, I want to apologize –"

"Shit happens, McAvoy. Anyone injured?"

"No, sir."

"Good." Ambassador McHale says, "Let me make some calls. Stay near the phone," and hangs up.

MacKenzie answers the phone twenty minutes later and hands it to Will. "Ambassador."

"French embassy," says McHale. "There's a military supply flight in the morning to Dar es Salaam. Nine-thirty."

"Thank you, Ambassador."

McHale pauses. "MacKenzie speaks highly of you."

"I'm honoured by that, sir."

The pause is longer this time. "Get her home safe."

"Absolutely," swears Will, and hands the phone back to MacKenzie before pulling out his own.

Within three minutes, he's speaking to someone at the Windhoek embassy; he can see the guy, through the glass-fronted service windows, watching his mouth move and hearing the words delayed like thunder from a distant storm. "We can't get you a car," he says. "The roads aren't passable for vehicles. It would be too dangerous." Will pictures the six of them in a car, edging through a crowd holding planks of wood and scraps of metal, glass bottles and semi-automatics, and he winces.

"I understand. Thank you." He hangs up, thinking. Somewhere in his rucksack is a map.

"All right, guys," he says. "We're going to the French embassy." He finds the map, unfolds it and frowns down at the streets for awhile. It's not even two miles away, but that's straight up Independence. MacKenzie's breath in his ear comes fast and short. "Leave behind everything you don't need. Everything, understand?"

When they're ready, a pile of clothes and shoes and toiletries is heaped in the corner. Will asks an official to lead them to a back exit. The woman spends the entire walk through the embassy trying to convince him to stay, but Will can hear the crowd outside the front gate; he wouldn't stay if she paid him.

It's three-quarters of a mile to the entrance of the National Botanical Gardens, but they take a circuitous route and stay off the streets, cutting through properties and behind houses. It takes nearly an hour, and the city is dark, so dark, the kind of blackness that feels textured and alive. Residents have retreated inside, shutting the lights and huddling in their living rooms, and the streetlights have been turned off. The air tastes like dust and it is dry, dry, dry like wildfire.

They have to climb a fence to get into the park, and afterward Will leads them behind a clump of greenery and throws his bag down. "Take ten," he says, and leans against a tree trunk. It's getting cold, now, and there is still no rain, no water anywhere. His mouth is sticky.

"Here," says MacKenzie, crouching beside him. There's a half-empty plastic water bottle in her hand, crinkling a little. He takes a small, cautious sip, swishes it around his mouth, and swallows.

"You okay?" he asks.

"Yeah. You?"

"Yeah." Tired, he thinks, but doesn't say it. He's not allowed to be tired, not yet. In the dark, she smoothes her palm across the side of his face. Her fingers are cool. He closes his eyes.

It's maybe a third of a mile through the gardens. They stay off the path although they see no one, and then scamper one by one across the road. There's a sports complex there, soccer field and a patch of trees and then tennis courts. Will opens his phone, hiding the glow beneath a cupped hand, to look at his maps app. Behind the sports complex is a tract of empty land, trees and trees, with a creek running through it. Probably no more than a dry bed now. They could walk along it, or they could take the road just east of them, which is far enough from Independence that they might be safe, especially with the forest between them. He waits, can't decide. MacKenzie leans over his shoulder to look at the satellite image.

"Creek or road?" he whispers.

"How far?"

"Mile or so."

"And then?"

"Little more than half a mile if we go straight to the embassy. We shouldn't, though. Probably another mile."

They glance at each other. MacKenzie looks like a ghost in the blue light of his phone, like a corpse. He tries to un-think it. There is darkness under her eyes, and a small scratch on her cheek from a tree branch. Her duffel drags at her arm.

"I think road," he says, and locks the phone.

The street is quiet and tar-dark, scrub and trees on both sides. He feels uncomfortably isolated, though they are half a mile from Independence Avenue. The moon slips out from behind a cloud. Will feels as though he's in a dream, the kids' sneakers making quiet sounds on the pavement. It's cold now, colder than usual, maybe ten Celsius, and they have little more than thin sweatshirts. Kendra stops to grab two extra shirts from her bag and slip them on; Reese long since donned a leather jacket. MacKenzie is wearing short sleeves and shakes like a blade of prairie grass in a hailstorm. He eases his mouth close to her ear.

"Don't you have a hoodie or something?"

She shakes her head. "Left it at the Embassy," she whispers. He shrugs his rucksack around his body and digs in it until he finds her an old Nebraska State sweatshirt. It comes down to her knees, and the sleeves trail down from her hands. " 'm so cold," she says, sounding exhausted. It is long past midnight, and Will begins to worry that the daylight will reveal them before they arrive at the French embassy.

"I know," he says. "I'm sorry." They are walking behind the grad students; he wraps an arm around her and draws her close. She leans her head against his chest and he risks pressing a kiss against her hair, so lightly that he hopes she won't feel it.

There is a burst of popping noises around the next bend, and the grad students turn to look at him. He points to the side of the road and they all scramble down the ditch. Will watches to make sure they're hidden in the trees before he follows, and he sees the shapes of several men appear at the end of the road. One of them fires into the air again, and Will throws himself down the embankment. The side of his head hits something hard and he crawls, dizzy, to the trees, biting his tongue to keep from grunting in pain.

The men pass, talking loudly, laughing, and Will waits another minute until he is sure that they won't hear six people climbing out from the cover of the trees. He holds his hand against his head; it's bleeding a little, sluggishly, but he isn't concussed, or at least he isn't concussed badly enough for it to matter. His head aches, though, and he has to pause once he regains the road to blink away flecks of light from his vision. His body feels heavy when they start to walk again, and his head hurts, his head hurts.

Houses appear on their right, huge mansions that curve back around swimming pools. Will thinks of the industrial park, less than two miles away, spitting its ashy people out onto Independence Avenue, the hungry and huddled and angry humanity of the streets, looking for food and dignity, and he breathes through the heat in his chest, the boiling in his stomach.

He had been planning to cut even farther east, work north and then make their way west to the embassy in as straight a line as possible, but the streets here are quiet and seem a world away from the riot two blocks west, so he leads the kids north, through backyards and tree groves until the houses are smaller and closer together. Their feet are dragging. His feet are dragging, too, numb with cold and exhaustion, and the ache in his head has settled into a throbbing. They stop once more, but Will only lets them sit for a few minutes before he hauls them up again – the sky is starting to turn gray in the east. He is afraid: they have to make their way back towards Independence, now when they are all too tired to be cautious, fingers and brains numb. The embassy is on Luther, only a block east of the Avenue, and the train station that fronts onto Independence is close, close. Will's heart beats against his chest. Close, close.

He is worried for nothing: Luther Street is empty in the pre-dawn, and the crowd in front of the embassy is small, gray-faced, and quiet. At the gate, MacKenzie speaks to the guards in French, arguing for a long time until they get a supervisor. Then she argues with the supervisor for awhile.

"Do you need me to call –?" he starts.

"No," she says, then raises her voice in exasperation to the embassy official. She sounds shrill in her fatigue and frustration; Will prevents himself from placing a hand on her shoulder. Finally, she sighs, and says, "_Ambassadeur McHale a parlé avec quelqu'un ici. Je voudrais le voir, s'il vous plaît_." In a few minutes, yet another official appears, sees them, and yells at the guard to let them in.

They're shown to a conference room, where the kids drop their bags with grateful sighs and blow on their fingers to warm them. MacKenzie bunches and unbunches the end of his sweatshirt's sleeves.

"We have four hours," he says. "Get some sleep." He tries to blink away his headache and ducks back into the hallway to talk to the embassy official and meet with his colleagues. When he comes back, an hour and a half later, the kids are passed on the floor, covered with extra clothes. MacKenzie is lying on his rucksack with her head pillowed on her duffel, the hood of his sweatshirt drawn down over her eyes. He wants nothing more than to curl up beside her. Instead, he fishes her phone from her pocket and goes back into the hallway.

McHale picks up on the first ring. "MacKenzie?"

"No, sir, she's sleeping. It's Will McAvoy."

"You're at the French embassy?"

"Yes, sir."

The other end of the line is silent for awhile, and Will can imagine that McHale had to put down the phone for a minute in relief. There's a crackle as he raises it again. "Good. Call me again from Dar." He hangs up.

Will goes to the bathroom and tries to rinse some of the blood from his hair. His flesh is tender and swollen under his fingers, and his hands shake as he dries them. He doesn't sleep, keeping himself awake by pacing up and down the hallway, steps measured and slow. Outside, the sun rises and he watches the progress of light crawling across the floor.

At eight forty-five, they climb up to the roof, squinting in the morning sun, and take a helo to the airport to load into a CC-150. There's a squad of French soldiers in there, leaning against the steel wall, and Will wonders how the hell McHale convinced someone to let six academics on this flight. He sits on his rucksack, watching the soldiers elbow each other and grin. They're young guys, and one of them, with a tiny pencil moustache, smiles at MacKenzie. She sits next to him, starts asking questions, and Will looks away.

Not long after they take off, the soldiers are napping and the grad students are asleep again, despite the turbulence. Will's head hurts, it hurts, it will hurt forever. He stares at the ceiling and doesn't see MacKenzie slide over to him.

"You should sleep a little," she says.

"When we're home," he says, and she looks at him sadly.

"Will, this isn't – you did everything right, and look, we're fine, it's not –"

He grinds his jaw and looks away. "I _said_, I'll sleep when we get home," he snaps, and doesn't look back to see if he's hurt her. She moves away, and he clenches his eyes shut.

It isn't the most uncomfortable flight he's been on, but that's mostly because it's only three hours before they disembark in Dar es Salaam. He has just enough time to call McHale again before they're boarding a flight for Newark, and home.

––––––––––––––

It's after twelve-thirty on Sunday morning when they step off the train onto campus. MacKenzie slept most of the way from Dar and is feeling okay. Not great, but okay. Will looks like he's about to collapse.

"All right, guys," he says. "Forget class tomorrow. Tuesday. Whatever the hell day it is, forget it. We'll meet on Thursday." As the grad students leave, MacKenzie sees him lean against a concrete post and stare at his hands, holding his bag, as though he isn't sure what to do with them.

"Will," she says, and then louder. "Will." He looks up, blankly. She calculates quickly that he has been awake for nearly forty-eight hours straight, a stretch that included leading five college students through a food riot in Africa. "You need to sleep."

"Sure," he says.

"Is there another train to New York?"

"Maybe. One." He shakes his head as if to clear it of water. "No, 's a Sunday. I'll go to the hotel."

"The hotel's a twenty-minute walk away."

"Yeah."

"You're not going to make it."

"Sure I am," he says, slumping a little farther against the post.

She reaches to cup his head gently and he gasps in pain and pulls away. His hair is stiff and sticky under her fingers. "_Will_," she says, frantically, and tugs his head, carefully, into her hands to examine the wound.

"It's fine," he says. "I just knocked it a little. I'm not concussed."

"When?" She probes at it, so, so gently, and his breathing goes tight.

"Ditch."

"That was over twenty-four hours ago. Do you still have a headache?"

"Yeah," he says. He's let his forehead rest against her shoulder, and she plays with the hair at the back of his neck.

"Then you're concussed. Jesus."

"I'm fine," he says again, into her shirt.

"Yeah, okay," she says, "you're going to come with me."

He pushes away from her, hands clumsy. It scares her: his hands are always in his control, speaking for him when he doesn't. "No, MacKenzie. No, no."

"Will, I'll sleep on the futon, but I am absolutely not letting you walk off by yourself."

Her position is eminently reasonable, but she's still surprised when he lets his head hang forward and says, quietly, "Okay." She shoulders his bag and draws him away from the post. In the fluorescent light of the train station, he looks ill.

It's five minutes to her dorm, maybe. The walk has never felt longer. It's March still, and the temperature at one a.m. is not far above freezing, with a damp that settles into her bones. Will says nothing. She tries to shift the strap of his bag more securely onto her shoulder, her hands in his sweatshirt sleeves slipping off of it until she gives up.

Will takes the steps one at a time and leans his head against the wall as she unlocks her door. She ushers him inside.

"I'm sleeping on the futon," he says.

"Sure," she says. "That's fine. I'm going to go brush my teeth and then I'll set it up for you. Why don't you just sit on my bed until then?" He nods. When she comes back, he is, as she expected, completely passed out on her comforter, his shoes still on, legs dangling over the side of the bed. She eases his loafers off, unbuckles his belt and slides it out of the loops, lifts his legs onto the bed, and tucks a pillow under his head. It's too hard to pull the comforter down while he's lying on it, so she just reaches towards her chair for the fleece blanket she's had since junior high, green with soccer balls printed on it, and drags it over him. She smooths his hair back from his forehead.

"Goodnight, Billy," she says, and stretches out on the futon.

She wakes at six-thirty, bright-eyed: jetlag, but she doesn't mind. Will is in the same position as when she went to sleep, unnaturally still and pale. She unpacks what little is left in her duffel, tossing most of it into her laundry hamper; she checks her email, tidies her room. At eight, she slips into the hallway to call Sloan.

"S'early," slurs Sloan.

"Yeah," said MacKenzie.

"You're home?"

"Yeah."

"Everything good?"

MacKenzie hesitates. "Sort of."

She hears a rustle, like Sloan is sitting up suddenly in bed. "Kenzie?"

"I'm fine, I promise," she says. "I'll explain later, okay? I just might not be able to see you until late. You'll be back on campus starting when? Five or so?"

"Yeah. Okay, sure," says Sloan, sounding anything but, and MacKenzie hangs up.

She calls home, checks in with her father and talks to her mom for awhile before going back into her room. Will is still sleeping. She dumps the contents of his rucksack on top of her hamper and carries it down to the laundry room. He's still sleeping when the washing machine is done, and he's still sleeping as she folds the dry laundry. He sleeps until eleven-thirty and wakes himself by turning his head too hard into the mattress.

"Mac?" he asks.

She leaves her book on the futon and sits beside him on the bed. "Hey," she says.

"What time's it?"

"Eleven-thirty. How do you feel?"

He frowns, reaches a hand back to touch the side of his head. "Dizzy."

"Just lie there for awhile," she says.

He sits up instead, rubbing a hand over his face. It makes a scratching sound against his stubble. "I need a shower."

"There's a men's bathroom down the hall."

"I can't."

She rolls her eyes. "Most people won't be back until later this afternoon. I'll make sure there's no one in there when you go in, and just come out when the bathroom's empty." She slides off the bed and pulls out a plastic bin from underneath it, grabbing a clean towel, a disposable razor, and one of the crappy toothbrushes she gets from her dentist, and tosses it all on her bed with her soap, toothpaste, and shampoo. "Go on."

He comes back looking more human, smelling like toothpaste and her shampoo, with a little colour in his clean-shaven face. He is wrapped in a towel, water droplets glistening in the hollows of his clavicles, and she can feel her eyes darken as she looks at him. She pushes back her desk chair and stands. He lets the door swing shut.

"MacKenzie," he says.

"Shut up," she says, and kisses him. He drops the shampoo and the toothbrush and toothpaste, and the soap and the razor, and places a hand on each side of her face, kissing her back. Water soaks through her shirt where she's pressed up against his warm, damp chest. He pulls back, shaking his head.

"MacKenzie…"

"You saved my life in Windhoek."

"I absolutely did not," he says, sharply.

"You came and got me."

"Well," he says. "_Yeah_."

"So."

"I brought you there," he says, suddenly. "I _brought _you there, all of you, I let you –" She kisses him again and spins them so that his back is to the bed, pushes him backwards and falls un-gracefully on top of him.

"Billy, you couldn't have kept me away with a baseball bat and an AK-47." He winces. "Too soon?"

"Too soon," he confirms, and flips them over so that she is breathless beneath him. "We absolutely should not do this. Absolutely."

"I know," she says, pulling her left leg around his right so that they're intertwined and pushing her hips upward so that she's pressing herself against his thigh.

"Stupidest thing I've ever done," he says, and she isn't sure whether he's talking about agreeing to go to Namibia or the fact that he is lowering his head to kiss his way up the side of her neck and nibble at her ear. She gasps.

"You must never have gone to college," she stutters, and he chuckles, low and deep, and she fumbles at the hem of her own shirt trying to get it off. He does it for her and then unclips her bra with a quick twist of the fingers on one hand, and when he sucks at a nipple she groans, everything inside of her melting into hot wax.

"God, MacKenzie," he says, breathing damp against her chest. "I can't fucking get you out of my head," and it would sound clichéd except that he clearly means it so much he can't breathe, and she rips the towel away and scratches her nails up his back until he rubs helplessly against her for a moment, skin soft against hers. She presses a palm against the flat of his breastbone and flexes her fingers into the muscles there, just to feel his chest expand as he breathes. He lifts two of her fingers and leans his head to suck them into his mouth, the back of his neck curved, muscles tight and vertebrae pressing up against his skin. She arches again, still in her jeans, and he scratches one finger down the inseam to make her throw her head back and push against his hand.

"Billy," she moans. "Please."

"Sh," he says, lips soft against the side of her neck, her collarbone, the curve beneath her arm. "Easy," and he flicks open the button of her jeans. She kicks them off frantically, and he kisses her again: sternum, ribcage, navel. He hooks a finger up and under the elastic of her underwear, rubbing his knuckle along the seam of her thigh, and looks at her seriously. "MacKenzie," he says, "Are you –?"

"Yes," she pants. "Yes, I'm sure, and for the love of all that is holy would you –" He rips her underwear down to her knees, tosses one of her legs over his shoulder, and presses his mouth to her. He curls his tongue into her and she groans. No one has done this for her before.

"I'm never fucking anyone in my peer group ever again," she says, and when his laugh vibrates against her, she groans again and clenches around his tongue.

He is patient, learning her, learning what she likes, and he waits until her language has lost its meaning and become a series of sounds that spills from her mouth before he curls two fingers into her as deeply as he can and circles his tongue around her clit once, twice, until she is coming with "Billy Billy Billy Billy" tripping over her tongue. When she opens her eyes, he is brushing the hair off of her forehead and she pushes herself up on her elbows to kiss him. She breaks away to say, "Condoms in the desk drawer," and takes the few seconds he isn't looking at her to breathe, breathe, breathe.

He's gentle with her and she doesn't want him to be; there's still gunfire behind her eyes when she closes them, and she grabs the back of his thighs to pull him in. "Please," she says, and he lifts her leg onto his shoulder again so that she gasps at the angle. She murmurs to him and he presses his face into her neck, and reaches down between them to circle his thumb around her clit. She's close, so close, when he says, strained, "Mac, I –" and she says, "Yes, come on, Will," and he makes a little sound and drives into her helplessly, and she's coming again as he groans.

He presses a kiss to the side of her forehead and stands to take care of the condom. She hasn't even caught her breath by the time he returns and draws her to him, holding her loosely as she rests her head on his chest to listen to his heartbeat race.

They lie there for a few minutes and then Will asks, "What now?"

She doesn't know, so she says, "Food?"

He hesitates, and she thinks he will argue, but then he says, "Hell, why not?"

She cranes her neck to grin at him. "PJ's? I want pancakes."

"Fuck yeah," says Will.

Will orders six blueberry pancakes with a side of bacon, and MacKenzie get a trio of banana, pecan, and chocolate-peanut-butter. Will looks on, half-intrigued and half-repulsed, as she gobbles the latter. "That's so weird," he says.

"It's delicious," she says, with her mouth full, and takes three strips of his bacon.

Lingering over coffee, he asks, "What's your schedule like tomorrow?"

"Two lectures in the morning and a tutorial in the afternoon." He raises an eyebrow and she adds, "Nothing I can't skip."

He grins. She gulps the rest of her coffee.

They take a train into the city. "I'll drive you back tomorrow," says Will. She took the window seat, backpack at her feet, so he's pressed up against her, thigh to thigh, staring past her at the world as it glides past the train. The sun appears every once in awhile, shining hard on the edges of crumbly brick buildings and cramped houses with chain link fences and dingy auto body shops. "You can make at least one of your classes. You shouldn't skip."

"Yes, I should."

"I'm a terrible influence," bemoans Will, and she turns her head to kiss him just to prove it.

They walk from Penn Station, the day breezy and brisk and the air beginning to taste of rain. She missed rain, in Namibia, and then she remembers the woman who ate dirt and thinks that she has no right, no idea what it means to miss rain.

"Hey," says Will, lifting and turning her chin with a gentle knuckle. He looks at her and then draws her away from the street, closer into the shadow of the skyscrapers. He cups her face and brushes a thumb from the corner of her eye to her temple, and then again. "Hey," he says again, quieter, but when she tries to smile at him, he looks away, clenching his jaw. "I should never have brought you," he says. "I should never have let you convince me –"

"No," she says. "No, it was amazing. I never had the chance before to – Look, going with you to Africa was – it could have been the most terrible trip in the world –"

"Running into roving gangs of rioters with military assault weapons _isn't_ the worst trip you can imagine?" asks Will dryly, but she ignores him.

"– and it wouldn't have mattered, not at all." Because I was with you, she thinks, but is too afraid to say it, not least because it sounds like a line from a soap opera. "And it wasn't terrible; it was the most incredible – we met people who…" She can't express herself and makes a frustrated noise instead, gesturing with her hands beside her head.

"Okay," says Will. "All right." He kisses her hair and takes her hand, which sends a little bubble of happiness from her toes to her chest.

His apartment is gorgeous, small but with huge lofted ceilings, and clean in a way that indicates he spends very little time there. It's also very spare.

"You need more furniture," she says.

"I wouldn't use more furniture."

"You'd use it if you had it,"she says, and he throws his arms into the air.

He leans against the kitchen counter to watch her go through the apartment, opening every cupboard, poking her head in every closet, and trying out every piece of furniture. When she finally comes to rest in his favourite armchair, he asks, "What do you want to do?"

She yawns. It's after four o'clock and the jet lag is beginning to drag at her. "Never leave again."

"I have movies," says Will, and she smiles.

They settle on Ocean's 11 ("This is my favourite movie of all time!" she says when she finds it. "Well, this and Pirates of the Caribbean." Will says, "I had you pegged as a chick-flick girl," and she hits him with the DVD case) and MacKenzie curls up on his chest with a blanket drawn up to her chin and is asleep before Matt Damon calls Julia Roberts the best part of his day.

She wakes up a little at the end, and when George Clooney says, "I knew what I was doing," she looks up at Will. "So did I," she says.

"Do you?" he asks. "Do you really?" and she looks away.

While he cooks dinner ("You cook?" she asks, surprised, and he says, "I live in New York; I'd be broke if I went out every night.") she wanders into his bedroom to call Sloan. His duvet is shiny, dark gray, and it feels like water between her fingers.

"I can't hang out tonight," MacKenzie says.

"Where are you?"

"New York."

"Where?"

She wants to giggle, and bites her tongue because she is not a ten-year-old girl. "Will's apartment."

"Really?"

She rolls her eyes. "No, I'm bunking in the giraffe enclosure at the zoo. Yes, really."

"Wow."

"Yeah."

"I expect details."

"You bet," she says. "Talk soon," and she hangs up. Walking back into the kitchen, she wraps her arms around his waist and presses her cheek against his back.

"Mmm," he says.

"Smells good."

"Onions sautéing in butter always do."

"What are you making?"

"Tomato sauce. It'll be awhile. Sorry, I don't have much in the fridge."

"Sounds perfect," she says.

After dinner, when she's pushing around the sauce on her plate and wondering if she could manage just a _little _more pasta, he lays his head down on his arms. She reaches over to rub his back between his shoulder blades.

"Does your head hurt?"

"Yeah," he admits, his voice, muffled in his elbow and thick with fatigue, sounding like a little boy's.

"Go lie down. I'll clean up."

She stops in the bathroom on her way to the bedroom and roots around for the Tylenol she knows she saw earlier. He's curled on his side, one hand lying open by his face, and she rouses him by twisting her fingers with his. "Sit up for a moment and take these," she says.

He looks groggy, but does as she says before sinking back against the pillows. She works at the buttons on his shirt and eases it off his shoulders before starting on his pants. "Up," she says, and he raises himself off the bed just enough for her to slide off his jeans. She lifts the corner of the duvet for him. "Get in."

Once he's settled, she fiddles with the things on his nightstand – watch, phone, coaster, box of Kleenex – so that she doesn't have to look at him. "I can sleep on the couch," she offers. "If you want."

His eyes fly open. "Do you want to?"

She shakes her head, and he grasps her wrist. "Come to bed," he says.

"Yeah," she whispers. "Okay."

––––––––––––––

She wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of rain on the roof. The room is dark, light filtering gray in around the edges of the curtains, and Will is heavily asleep behind her, his arm curled loosely over her side. She is comfortably warm beneath the duvet although there is a faint chill in the air, and she nuzzles into her pillow. The rain is what awakened her: in her sleep, it reminded her of the popping of gunfire on a dark road. She lies there thinking of all the ways things could have gone wrong on Friday until she's shaking. She closes her eyes and sees Will's face, pale and sick like it was in the fluorescent lights of the train station, feels again his hair thick with blood, and she turns to press her face against his chest.

"Will," she says. "Billy," and clutches his t-shirt.

He comes awake and his grip on her tightens. "Hey," he says, swiping his thumb over the back of her neck. "It's okay." He turns onto his back so that she can pillow her head on the soft place under his collarbone and she sobs, once, into the cotton of his shirt. "It's okay."

He kisses her forehead and murmurs until the shaking eases, and she falls asleep again to the sound of his heart beating on, on.

In the morning, she wakes as he is emerging from his shower, and he fucks her gently on the unmade bed, the rain still streaking the windows gray. When she finishes her own shower, her hair wet down her back, he is walking in the door, brushing water droplets from his shoulders, with a bag of bagels, a block of cream cheese, and a package of lox. They eat at the breakfast bar, quietly.

"I could drive you back now," he offers.

"Or not," she says.

"Or not," he repeats, and smiles.

She settles on the couch with some of the reading she was supposed to have done over spring break, her feet in Will's lap. He absently rubs them while he organizes his notes for class and then works on yesterday's crossword, interrupting her reading to ask about nearly every clue.

In the end, she has to call Sloan again to say that she's staying another night.

On Tuesday, they eat breakfast quickly, and then ruin their plan to get on the road early by taking a joint shower. MacKenzie is fifteen minutes late to her first class.

At lunch, she and Sloan find the quietest possible corner of the dining hall. It's the first time MacKenzie has eaten there since before Namibia, and for a moment, everything looks strange, as if she has been away for years.

"Start from the moment you left campus," Sloan says, and MacKenzie does. Sloan listens while steadily working her way through her food, until MacKenzie gets to the three guys outside the American embassy, at which point Sloan seems to forget that she's eating and doesn't remember again until MacKenzie catches her up to her late arrival that morning in Eastern European WWII history lecture.

Sloan sits back in her chair. "I'm processing," she says.

"Sure," says MacKenzie, and attacks her food, which has gone cold.

"Right," says Sloan a few minutes later. "A few points."

"Shoot."

"One. You almost _died_."

"Yeah."

"Just making sure."

"Accurate statement."

"Okay, then. Two: you speak French? How do I not know this about you?"

"Also, Italian and some Russian," says MacKenzie.

"How much Russian?"

MacKenzie shrugs. "_Where's the bathroom?_, _Three shots of vodka, please_, _Your government is corrupt_. That sort of thing."

Sloan nods. "Three: is Will okay?"

"I think so. I let him drive us in today and it was fine."

"Four: how was it?"

MacKenzie closes her eyes. "So, _so _good."

Sloan sips her water and assumes an attentive posture. "Tell me more," she says.

––––––––––––––

On Thursday, Will gets to class early and sits with his cup of coffee, staring at the table. He hasn't seen MacKenzie since Tuesday morning, though she's texted – _I'm bored. This professor is not as good a lecturer as you_, and _This kid in my class is trying to make the argument that re_-_interpretations of the law by the Supreme Court don't apply to people who have been indicted but not yet tried. Help me prove him wrong_, and _What are you doing right now?_, and _Did you know that echidnas are the only animal that can burrow straight downward?_

_I did not_, Will had texted back. _Thank you_.

_I do what I can,_ she wrote.

He looks up when he hears the door open, and MacKenzie walks in, followed by a tall man with gray hair. They have the same nose, the same eyebrows, the same sharp expression and energy of motion, and Will is pushing back his chair and standing before he really processes it.

"Professor, this is my father," says MacKenzie, smiling at them each in turn. "Dad, Professor Will McAvoy."

Will offers his hand, and McHale shakes it firmly. "Ambassador, a pleasure," he says.

"All mine," says McHale.

"I'd like to thank you for –"

"No need," says the Ambassador, who seems to have inherited the British love of efficiency far more than the British love of drawn-out courtesy. "I think I should be thanking you." He lays an arm around MacKenzie's shoulder and squeezes gently; MacKenzie smiles up at him, pleased, and Will hopes she looks at _him_ with even half as much fondness. "I was going to take MacKenzie to lunch after your class. Would you like to join us?"

"If that's okay with Ms. McHale," Will says, although it feels as though a flock of migrating monarch butterflies have been re-routed to his stomach, and MacKenzie blushes and nods.

"Excellent," says the ambassador, and kisses his daughter's cheek. "See you soon, sweetheart."

"Bye, Daddy," she says, and the ambassador passes by Tess and Gary on his way out the door.

Will starts the lesson by asking, tentatively, "How's everyone doing?"

"Good." "Yeah." "Fine," he gets, though Tess looks like she hasn't slept well, and, surprisingly, neither does Reese.

He's nervous enough about lunch that he loses the thread of his lecture a few times, and has to ask Gary to repeat his entire argument once. McHale didn't seem angry, but he's British and professional, and he has every right to be angry. Will almost killed his daughter.

It's after he thinks that that he has to ask Gary to repeat himself.

They go for seafood, and Will tries to apologize or to thank McHale four more times before their drinks come. The ambassador's phone rings as the waitress is setting three beers on the table – porter for McHale, lager for Will, and wheat ale for MacKenzie – and he hands it to MacKenzie. "It's your mother."

She stands to take the call outside, and Will has just taken a sip of his beer when McHale says, "McAvoy. Are you sleeping with my daughter?"

Will chokes, but McHale waits patiently until he has managed to swallow and cough. "I –" Will rasps, his throat feeling scoured. "Yes." He forces his gaze off the table and onto the ambassador's face.

McHale is silent for a moment, then says, "Well?"

Will is confused. "Well, what?"

"You've been apologizing every other minute for taking her on a class trip. Aren't you going to apologize for this?"

Will shakes his head. "No, sir."

"Why not?"

"I'm not sorry," Will says. "Well." It isn't strictly true, because he is, he's so sorry. "I am, for a lot of things about it, but not in any way that has to do with you." It's honest, at least, and he isn't sure that honesty is the best policy, but he has nothing better. There are no excuses for this.

McHale looks at him for a long, long moment, and then nods at Will's beer. "Drink up, McAvoy," he says, and Will thinks that the ambassador probably knows how difficult it is to deny his daughter anything she asks for.

When MacKenzie returns, Will takes her hand, and she smiles before looking at her father in panic. When he says nothing, she grins enormously and pulls her chair as close to Will's as she can. Will kisses her knuckles and reads his menu. The corners of his mouth will not go down.

––––––––––––––

Will grades MacKenzie's final project at the breakfast bar while she writes a paper for Practical Ethics on his couch.

"This class is so much bullshit," she says. "I'm writing nonsense."

"And now you know never to take a philosophy class again," says Will. "Did you really get the Namibian Deputy Minister of Regional and Local Government, Housing, and Rural Development to say that rural villages don't offer enough state economic benefits to warrant the expense of the proposed aid initiative?"

"Yes."

"When?"

"Oh, I called her after we got back. I think she was a little overwhelmed when all six of us were there at once."

Will gives her an A before he's finished reading. Then he reconsiders.

"Maybe I should give you a B+ so that no one accuses me of favouritism," he muses.

She's on her feet in an instant, her binder and pencil spilling onto the floor, and he hides his smile behind his coffee mug. "Don't you dare."

"A- then?" he asks, and when she climbs over the couch to hammer at his arm with her fists, he laughs and grabs her hands and carries her to bed.


	2. What We Believe In

**What We Believe In**

**.**

**Author's Note:** _This is more of a sequel than a next chapter, but it references the first part heavily enough that I decided to post it as the latter. It ended up being about three times longer than I expected and took me forever to write; it's also rambly and, in parts, shamelessly fluffy. But I thoroughly enjoyed writing it, so I figured I'd post it anyway and ask for your forgiveness._

_As a side note, all of the information about the story MacKenzie is writing is, as far as I know, accurate, although some of it may be a little out of date. The places are real, the programs exist, the sources are valid, and the information is true._

_Finally, thank you to everyone who reviewed the first part. The response was overwhelming. I can't seem to leave this universe alone, and I want sincerely to thank everyone who read and enjoyed it even a little._

––––––––––––––

_Seems to me, we are what we believe in._

––––––––––––––

"You requested me as your thesis advisor?"

"Well, yeah," MacKenzie says. The sound of a door closing comes over the phone line, and he pictures her settling herself on her bed across the city, in her parents' Upper East Side apartment. He wonders what her room looks like, whether there are posters of boy bands on her walls left over from her pre-teen days, or if she puts framed pictures of her friends on her desk, or if the walls are lined with clippings of newspaper articles and photos of her shaking hands with heads of state. "Of course I did."

Will files away the email from his department chair and rubs one eyebrow with a knuckle. "Don't you think that might make people… I don't know, more suspicious?"

"No."

"MacKenzie…"

"Honest answer, Will. If anything, it will give us an excuse to spend more time together _without_ it being remarked upon."

"I guess." He isn't convinced, but he _wants _to advise her, even on a purely academic level. He wants to see what she can do, and he wants to be a part of it.

If he also realizes that there's a hot, turbulent feeling in his gut at the thought of anyone else advising her, he tries not to acknowledge it.

"Are you doing okay, Billy?" MacKenzie asks. "Are you getting out? I don't like the thought of you cooped up in your apartment, writing all day by yourself."

"It's air-conditioned in my apartment." He holds up a hand when he senses she's about to object, even though she can't see him. "But yes, I'm getting out."

"Picking up a sandwich from the deli down the street doesn't count."

Will looks out his window and sighs. It's evening, the heat beginning to ease and the streets turning blue and gray, the tops of the buildings a burnished bronze, blinding with late-day sun. People are walking to dinner, eating outside at cramped sidewalk tables or rooftop patios, laughing, scooping hummus and chewing olives. He thinks of the short story MacKenzie read to him before the end of the semester: _The Polish neighborhoods have that snow_._ They have that fruit with the light on it, they have that music you can't find_. They had been sitting on the futon in her dorm room, her feet in his lap. He misses her, suddenly, her physical presence, the fact of her skin and the truth of her delicate bones. "I'm fine, Mac," he says.

"I just worry."

"I know."

"Why don't you come to dinner tomorrow? Dad would love it."

"What about your mother?"

He can't actually hear her shrug, but he's so sure she does that it doesn't matter. "She won't think it's weird."

"Maybe you should tell her we're…" Damn. _Dating _isn't right, because they don't really go on dates. _Seeing each other_ sounds too casual. "Together?"

MacKenzie hesitates. "I could," she says slowly, and then pauses again, this time for longer. "Would you like me to?"

Will puffs up his cheeks and breathes out slowly. This was not the conversation he'd intended to have. "I –" he says, nervous as he hasn't been for months with her. "If you want." It's a cop-out answer, and he's ashamed of it as soon as the words are out of his mouth. He's the adult here. _Jesus_, he thinks, that's so true. "Yeah. I think I would like that."

He can hear the smile in her voice. "Okay."

"Maybe ask your dad what he thinks, first?" Will is a little terrified of MacKenzie's mother, in an entirely different way than he's terrified of her father. He understands the ambassador pretty well, but Mrs. McHale is an unknown. Mothers and daughters. He presses his palms against the granite of his breakfast bar and watches three birds swoop above the building across the street, weaving in and out against the heavy clouds in the east.

MacKenzie laughs a little. "Will do. Dinner tomorrow?"

Will clears his throat. "Yeah. Text me."

"Sure." Her voice softens a little. "Bye, Will."

"Bye, MacKenzie," he says, and keeps the phone against his ear even after she's hung up.

––––––––––––––

Will spends at least twenty minutes deciding what to wear – jeans or chinos, t-shirt or polo? If an Oxford shirt, should he go with a regular spread collar or the more casual button-down variety? He catches himself holding a brown belt in one hand and a black belt in the other.

"This is ridiculous," he tells his reflection. His reflection says nothing, but he thinks it agrees.

In the end, he throws on a pair of khakis and a polo shirt, and at the last minute grabs a sport coat to put over it. He leaves his bed invisible under several layers of discarded clothes, and only once he's in the cab does he realize that he's wearing one navy sock and one black.

The doorman nods at him and the front desk waves him up, so they must have been told to expect him. Will tries not to fidget in the elevator and smooths down his hair over and over.

Ambassador McHale greets him at the door, but MacKenzie is just behind, sliding around the corner on socked feet, grinning at him. Will can't help but grin back.

"Ambassador," he says, holding out his hand.

McHale gives it a firm shake. "Call me John," he says.

"Yes, sir," says Will, and McHale works his jaw in order to hide a smile.

"Elizabeth is almost finished in the kitchen," he says. "MacKenzie, do you want to show Mr. McAvoy around?" MacKenzie nods delightedly. "In the meantime, McAvoy, can I get you a drink? Cabernet?"

"Sounds great," says Will, and nods at him before following MacKenzie down the hall to her bedroom.

She shuts the door behind them. "Hi," she says, and pushes him up against it.

"I don't think –" Will starts, but he doesn't get much farther because she's kissing him, her entire body flush to his, and he's only just able to control the longing moan that's building in his throat.

MacKenzie takes her lips from his and nuzzles into his neck. "Missed you," she says against his skin.

He wraps his arms around her and kisses the top of her head. "I missed you too." He lets them stay there for another moment and then reluctantly pushes her off of him. "Come on. I don't want your dad to walk in on us."

She giggles and opens the door as he looks around the room. It's a little messy, although not as bad as the inside of her backpack. He wonders if she cleaned up a bit for him. The bed is hastily made, a green fleece blanket thrown haphazardly over the end of the white duvet. Soccer trophies and debating medals top the crowded bookcases; she's run out of space on the shelves, so some books lie horizontally atop the shelved ones, and there's a pile on the edge of her desk and another beside the bed. An enormous map takes up one wall, and there are framed newspaper articles and photos of MacKenzie with her parents on the others, but her closet door is slightly ajar, and Will can see that the inside of it is covered with a Backstreet Boys poster. He hides a smile.

"We might as well go back out, then," says MacKenzie. He puts a hand to the small of her back as they go and she makes a contented sound.

Dinner is an unsurprisingly elegant affair, served on Limoges plates, with engraved silver and a crystal decanter that McHale says was a gift from the former president of Switzerland. Will has cause to be grateful for the ambassador nearly a dozen times before the end of the meal; as blunt as he is, he's also a keen navigator of social situations, and he keeps Will engaged and talking despite the reservedness of his wife, who looks at Will with a very obvious air of not having made up her mind about something. It's better than he hoped for, at least.

"MacKenzie says you're working on a book?" says McHale, as Will is leaning back in his chair with a satisfied sigh.

"Yes, sir."

"Similar to your first?"

Will shakes his head. "No, sir. Much less serious. Just a collection of anecdotes and experiences. After spending long enough as a journalist, you start to amass some strange stories. I realized that I enjoyed telling them to my classes, and they seemed to enjoy hearing them. Although," he adds, taking a sip of wine. It's a really excellent cabernet. "Maybe that was just politeness."

"Well, _I'm_ looking forward to it," MacKenzie says. She turns to her father. "Will won't let me read it."

"It's pretty terrible right now," says Will.

"I'm absolutely positive that's not true," says MacKenzie, and they grin a little ridiculously at each other for a moment.

Will drops his gaze and aligns the fork and knife on his plate. "Maybe once I've revised it and it's less embarrassing." He looks up at her again, his voice quieter. "I wouldn't want you to think less of me."

She's opening her mouth to respond, with a soft, surprised look in her eyes, when her mother stands and begins gathering up plates. "MacKenzie," she says.

"Um, sure," says MacKenzie, and starts picking up serving dishes without looking at Will again.

Will pushes back his chair and half-stands. "Can I help?"

"No," say the ambassador and Mrs. McHale simultaneously, in very different tones, and Will sits back down. As the women go through the connecting door into the kitchen, McHale slaps Will on the back and refills his wine glass.

"You're doing fine," he says quietly, and Will breathes out heavily. McHale lets him take a few sips, examining him over the rim his own glass. "MacKenzie said you're going to be her thesis advisor?"

Will twists his neck back and forth to loosen it, uncomfortable. "She convinced me, yes."

McHale smiles understandingly and they share a look. Will is _so_ glad that this man has, for whatever reason, decided to be on his side.

MacKenzie comes back in to finish clearing the table, and her face is flushed, her jaw quivering but jutting out stubbornly. Her movements are jerky, the plates she stacks clattering together, and Will stops her by gently wrapping a hand around her wrist. "MacKenzie?" he asks, and she shakes her head and pulls her wrist away, refusing to meet his eyes.

"It's fine," she says, and leaves again. Will stares hard at the way his fingers are curled around the stem of his wineglass, trying not to notice McHale's eyes on him.

It's barely thirty seconds before there's a ringing crash from the kitchen, and Will is out of his chair before he's had time to process the fact that he even put down his wineglass, McHale right behind him. MacKenzie is standing in the kitchen, shell-shocked and sheepish, one arm still upraised, amid an impressive scattering of broken glass. When she sees the men burst in, she seems to collect herself a little and holds up a hand to placate them.

"I knocked over the salad bowl. It's fine."

"Are you okay?" asks Will, and she nods.

"Yeah, of course. I'll go get the broom."

She lifts her foot to take a step and Will cries, "No!" She stops, one socked foot raised, swaying precariously, looking at him with equal parts curiosity and irritation. "You'll hurt yourself." He considers the remains of the salad bowl. It has shattered spectacularly; he can see a big chunk of glass glinting all the way across the room. His steps crunch beneath his shoes as he walks towards her, wrapping his arms around her and lifting her safely back over the threshold. "Show me where the broom is," he says, "and _I'll_ do it. You and your father can sit."

He re-enters the kitchen, broom in hand. Mrs. McHale is washing the silver. He clears his throat. "Thank you for dinner, ma'am," he says, awkwardly. He wants to thank her for MacKenzie, for beautiful, smart, capable, enchanting MacKenzie, but he doesn't really know how. Instead, he starts sweeping.

After a minute, she turns to him and with no preamble asks, "What are your intentions towards my daughter?"

Will accidentally sends a hunk of glass skittering across the tiles. He straightens slowly. How is he supposed to answer that question? "I –" he starts, and then looks her in the eye. "Entirely honourable." He raises a hand and makes some sort of waving motion. He's not really sure what it's supposed to be. "I know that may be difficult to believe. Because of our… positions. Trust me, I wish that our situation were different, that I were good enough to –" _deserve her_, he means, but the problem is that if he were a good man, he would never have accepted her lunch invitation that first day, never have brought her to dinner, never have kissed her in the snow, never have seen her again. If he were a good man, he wouldn't have MacKenzie, and so as long as he has her, he'll never deserve her.

Maybe some of this is visible on his face, because Mrs. McHale's expression softens a little, though her lips are still pursed. "John thinks well of you," she says.

"I'm honoured by his regard," says Will, and means it.

She stares at him for another long minute, then tilts her head to indicate the glass-strewn floor. "Well, go on then," she says, and he sweeps.

––––––––––––––

MacKenzie insists upon walking him out. They had another bottle of wine with dessert, so he wraps an arm around her shoulders to steady her as they leave the elevator and work their way across the lobby.

"We should talk about your thesis," says Will. "You know, for real."

"Sure. Maybe I can come over soon?"

She's resting her head against his shoulder, leaning heavily enough against him that walking straight requires some attention. He smiles. "Whenever you want." They pause at the door and she disentangles herself from him, one hand resting on his chest.

"Billy," she says, and her voice is so serious that he stops smiling.

"What's wrong?"

She moves the hand on his chest to cup his face, looking at him. "I could never think less of you. You know that, right? Nothing you could ever do would change my opinion of you."

Will opens his mouth to say, _I doubt that_, but closes it because, seeing her look at him so earnestly, so openly, he's not so sure that he does. _God help me if I ever hurt her_, he thinks.

"Say you understand," she says.

"I do." His voice is rough, and she reaches up on her tiptoes to kiss him lightly, her lips soft on his mouth.

"Okay. Goodnight, Will."

In response, he grasps her hand and squeezes it, tangling their fingers together for a moment. "Goodnight," he says, and he watches her as she squeezes his hand in return, then walks back across the lobby and gets into the elevator. As the doors close, she turns and gives him a little smile, and he waits until he can no longer see her before he walks out into the street to find a cab, and home.

She comes over on Friday night, straight from her internship, dumping her bag on his counter and heading directly to the bedroom to change. "I hate pantyhose," he hears her say.

"Did you get to do anything interesting today?"

"I made copies. Is making copies interesting? I also had to go back to the deli, _twice_, because first there were no pickles with Troy's pastrami on rye, and then – I kid you not – the mustard wasn't spicy enough."

Will wrinkles his brow in confusion. "What was the deli going to do about the insufficient spiciness of the mustard?"

Mac leans backwards to poke her head out the door and roll her eyes. "That's exactly what I said."

"What _did_ they do?"

"They put more mustard on. God, Will, does it matter even a little bit?"

Will smiles and gets off the couch to mix her a mojito. She loves mojitos, and they're pretty good at letting her relax a little. "No. Why are you interning at a publishing company, again?"

She reemerges from the bedroom, hair loose around her shoulders, wearing one of his t-shirts and, he assumes, a pair of shorts. The shirt comes down to her knees, so it's tough to tell. "A terrible lapse in judgment," she says. "And because the New York Times didn't take me."

Will puts down the bottle of soda water and crosses the room to kiss her, tangling his fingers in the hair at the base of her skull so that when he pulls away, it's thick and wild. "Their loss," he says softly, and then quirks a smile at her. "Any dinner requests?"

They eat at the breakfast bar, as usual, legs tangled together as they work their way through veggie lasagna. Will isn't sure why he has a dining room table, at this point.

"Your thesis," he says, eventually. "What were you thinking?"

"Well," says MacKenzie, reaching past him to spear some lasagna straight off the serving plate. "I was originally thinking that I'd apply for funding to spend this summer abroad. You know, do some research or whatever. But clearly," she looks at him sidelong, "I decided not to do that."

Will does some quick math. She would have had to made that decision by January, February at the latest. Before her birthday, before Namibia. He smirks. "Confident, were you?"

She shrugs. "I also thought that I could maybe expand whatever story I did on Namibia. But now…" She frowns. "Did you know that transitional federal prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing are kept for years in maximum security county jails? Because building federal prisons is expensive, so the Bureau of Prisons would rather pay these really awful places to house them cheaply."

Will frowns. "There's been a lot written about the prison system in America," he says.

"But mostly about private prisons – which are bad enough, don't get me wrong." She takes another bite and chews thoughtfully. "These dinky, local jails were built to house violent criminals, but they're more than half-full with federal prisoners, white-collar high-rollers who will end up being sentenced to three years for tax fraud. It's just good business to draw federal funding, so the jails do their best to cut costs and make their per diem rate attractive for the BOP. We're talking local county jails with annual revenues of over ten _million _dollars. Plus, the prisoners count as part of the population, even though they can't vote, so that's more state funding for whatever municipality they're in, right there."

Will's frown deepens. It's a good story. A great story, actually. "Who oversees the program and the federal contracts? The Marshals Service?"

MacKenzie raises her eyebrows. "It's unclear."

Will whistles. "Good job, MacKenzie," he says. "You've done your homework."

She grins. "Does that mean I get the weekend off?"

"I think something could be arranged," says Will, and he draws her into his lap.

––––––––––––––

She sees him nearly every weekend after that. She tries not to think about how comfortable she is, lying late in his bed on Sunday mornings, sipping coffee dreamily in the sun as he works. Not because it scares her that she never wants to leave, but because she knows she'll have to soon. At the start of the semester, they'll have to forget what it's like to wake up together; she'll need to remember what it's like to pretend to be interested in twenty-year-old boys at parties and he'll have to learn to hide the way he looks at her when he walks into a any room that has her in it. These few months feel like a summer carved just for them, as if the millions of people in Manhattan fade to nothing under the blue sky. Will takes her for dinner, to Broadway shows, down to Battery Park to have a picnic and watch the boats break over the waves. MacKenzie knows it can't last.

Still, the autumn surprises them, intruding into Will's apartment at the end of August, turning the evening light a ruddy bronze. On a Friday, the night before she leaves, MacKenzie finishes her internship with as much grace as she can muster and packs her suitcases. After, she calls him from her bedroom.

"You ready?" he asks.

"No," she says, and he says nothing for awhile. She wants to tell him she loves him, because she thinks it's true, but she doesn't want to say it over the phone. Instead, she pictures his face, tired and a little worn because it's past midnight, eyes gleaming in the light of his bedside lamp. She wants badly to run her fingers over the soft fabric of his t-shirt and feel his heat beneath, and clenches her fingers into her duvet instead.

"I can meet you on campus tomorrow," Will says. "Help you unpack. Just… see you." It's been nearly a week, and she misses him.

"You shouldn't," she whispers. There will be people around, thousands of students.

He sighs. "I know."

"My father's driving me, anyway, so I'm sure I'll be completely settled in by lunch."

Will snorts. "It will take you until lunchtime just to bring in all your shoes."

"I miss you," she says, and hears him smile.

"I'll be there next week. You'll see me soon."

"Yeah, I know." She's not sure why she feels so sad about this. Logically, it's ridiculous: she'll actually see him _more _once school starts, maybe even every day. And he'd started staying at the hotel near the university much more often by the end of last semester so that he'd be close; if he keeps doing that, she might even get to sleep next to him sometimes. It had just been _nice_, living like real people, without worrying about anyone finding out.

"Hey," Will says, gently. She makes a little noise to acknowledge him. "I miss you too."

She smiles, and says goodnight.

She is notcompletely settled by noon, but everything is out of the car and her father goes to pick up sandwiches while she puts her clothes away and shelves her books. The door is propped open with a box full of plastic silverware and ramen left over from last year, which is why Sloan is able to walk in while MacKenzie is arranging shoes under her bed and cuff her hard on the back of the head.

"Hey!" says MacKenzie, straightening up quickly and smacking her skull on the bed frame. "_Ow_."

"That was for being _the _worst texter-backer ever this summer."

"I don't think that's a –"

"I don't _care _if it's a word," says Sloan, crossing her arms. "You suck."

MacKenzie rubs the back of her head gingerly, wincing. "I know. I'm sorry."

Sloan sighs. "It was because of Will, wasn't it? I'm going to kill him –"

"Please don't," MacKenzie says, but Sloan doesn't seem to notice.

"– well, not _kill _him, because I actually kind of like him, but give him a dressing-down, anyway. Except for not literally – that's more your department, I guess –"

"_Sloan_," says MacKenzie, horrified, and runs to close the door.

"What?"

"Keep your voice down!" MacKenzie whispers.

"Why? No one could know who we're talking about."

MacKenzie considers. "That's true, I guess."

"Anyway, I'm going to have to have a chat with William." She slides her phone out of her pocket. "What's his number?"

MacKenzie stares. "What?"

"His phone number. Will's cell phone. Come on, Kenzie, this isn't that hard."

MacKenzie snags her phone from the desk and reads out Will's cell number, which is saved under just "Will" despite her almost obsessive insistence that all of her contacts be properly tagged with first and last names. Will makes fun of her for being so organized electronically while her backpack provides the perfect environment for growing laboratory-grade bacterial cultures. He had actually run her bag through the washing machine last week, claiming that he was afraid carrying it around all semester would give her a previously-undiscovered disease.

"Cool, thanks," says Sloan. "Gotta go – I left my dresses in my suitcase and I don't want to pay for dry cleaning to un-wrinkle them." She's out the door before MacKenzie can respond.

Her father leaves after dinner, and MacKenzie spends the rest of the evening sticking pictures to the wall and unpacking the thousand random things she's accumulated in the last three years: a pig-shaped stress ball named Wilbur, eight types of tea and four chipped mugs (only two of which are stolen from the dining hall), a snow globe her father had brought her from Austria last winter, a wooden tulip she'd bought in Amsterdam. Towels on hooks, clothes in the wardrobe, mirror hung, bed made – at two a.m., she decides she's earned an ice cream sandwich from the all-night convenience store. The air coming through her open window is pleasant, but damp, and she's worn out enough that she feels a little shivery, so she throws on a flannel shirt that she thinks probably belongs to Will and lets herself out of the building.

She picks up some snacks for her room while she's at it, so she's juggling a loaf of bread and some peanut butter and Nutella and Oreos and some more ramen (because you really can't ever have enough, and Sloan eats three packages in a night whenever they're writing papers) when someone bumps into her and she drops at least half of it.

"Hey!" she says, and turns around to see Reese, who ducks his head and looks embarrassed.

"Sorry," he mutters, and kneels to help her pick up the peanut butter jar, which has rolled across the aisle.

"Hey, Lansing!" There are a few scruffy guys near the door, holding several 2-litre soda bottles and looking pretty drunk. One of them is yelling. "Hurry the fuck up." When Reese continues to help MacKenzie collect her fallen groceries, the loud guy rolls his eyes and walks over. "Stop flirting. She's not worth it anyway." He kicks a pack of ramen, and it goes skittering down the aisle and bounces off a display of Nutri-Grain bars, shaking a few boxes to the floor. "Let's _go_, before they finish all the vodka."

"If it's Popov, it doesn't count as vodka," MacKenzie says, straightening up, her face red. It's almost certainly what they have at whatever party he's going back to, since it's about three dollars per handle and the only thing anyone ever buys. "I didn't realize that grad students had such shitty taste in alcohol." The drunk guy makes a move towards her, and he's sloppy enough to be threatening, so she backs up a step into the aisle shelving and some cereal boxes tumble to the ground.

Reese puts a hand on the guy's chest and says, "I'm coming. Let's go." The loud guy flips MacKenzie off – unnecessarily, she thinks, because it's just fact that Popov is disgusting. It's not like she insulted him or anything. She watches them leave. Just outside the door, Reese stops and points back over his shoulder at the store with his thumb, then waves the rest of them onward and comes back inside. MacKenzie starts picking up the cereal boxes.

"Sorry," says Reese. "That guy's just an asshole." He fetches the ramen package and stacks the fallen Nutri-Grain boxes back on the display.

"Yeah," says MacKenzie, standing, awkward, with her arms full of college-student groceries. She wonders what excuse he made to his buddies.

"How've you been?" Reese asks.

"Good, yeah," says MacKenzie.

"Good summer?"

"It was. You?"

Reese shrugs and puts his hands in his pockets. "Sure. Just working on my diss. You know." He stares at his feet for a moment, then takes a deep breath and looks back up at her. "Look, I know I was kind of a dick to you in the spring, and I'm sorry. I'd like to make it up to you. Would you – would you like to go out to dinner sometime? Or lunch, we could do lunch."

"Oh," says MacKenzie. She's pretty thrown. "Actually, um, I'm sort of… with someone at the moment." Reese looks horrified and humiliated and makes as if to apologize and escape as soon as possible, so she puts a hand on his arm. "But I appreciate the offer. Really. And I don't think you're quite as much of a dick as I think you think you are."

He half-smiles at that. "I didn't follow that."

She releases his arm. "I think you did." He gives another half-grin, and she notices that he looks tired, and a lot less sure of himself than he did last spring. "Hey, Reese," she starts, hesitant. It's not like they're friends or anything. "Are you okay?"

He had been looking away towards the hot food bar, where a group of completely wasted sophomore girls are trying to figure out how to request mac and cheese on the automatic ordering machines, which seems to involve a lot of shrieking and laughing and _oh my god_s, but his head snaps back towards her at that. "Of course," he says. He looks even worse now, pale, his eyes dark in his papery face, and she stares at him for a minute without saying anything. Finally, he says, as if his lips are numb, "You weren't there."

"What?"

"You weren't there," he repeats. One of the sophomore girls trips over her own heels and falls, laughing hysterically. "It was when Professor McAvoy went to get you, and the rest of us walked to the embassy. I was last, and the rest of them had just walked past an alley when I looked into it and the guy standing right there in the alley entrance got shot in the head." He swallows and looks away, squeezing his eyes shut and then opening them to blink rapidly, several times, looking up at the fluorescent lights of the convenience store. There's a beeping sound as the cashier scans someone's items. "Maybe five feet away from me. It was like his head exploded." MacKenzie winces, and Reese grimaces. "Sorry."

"Did you tell them? The others?" Reese shakes his head. "Have you told _anyone_?"

"I'm telling you."

"Jesus, Reese," says MacKenzie.

He shrugs. "There's not that many people I can talk to about it, you know?"

"You could talk to Will – to Professor McAvoy. You should."

He sends her a sharp look when she says _Will_, and she curses herself, curses the fact that it's 2 a.m. and she's tired and this guy five or six years older than she is and probably infinitely smarter has just made her give herself away so obviously. But he doesn't push it. "Maybe," he says.

"You should," MacKenzie says again.

"Yeah, okay," he says. "Thanks." He turns as if to go, and she's struck by a thought.

"Do you want to come over?" she asks, and holds up the package of Oreos in her left hand. "I have cookies now."

"Nah, I should get back." He nods his head towards the door in a vague way. "They'll be wondering where I am."

"Sure," says MacKenzie. "See you," and she can't help feeling sad for him as he leaves.

On her walk back to her dorm, she texts Will, _I just had a very strange interaction with Reese._

He texts her back almost immediately. _Strange how?_

_He was nice to me. Then he asked me out. Then… I don't think he's doing very well_. She sends the text and then adds, _Why aren't you asleep?_

As she's unlocking her door, he calls her. "I was just reading," he says.

"It's two-thirty in the morning."

"Yeah, well. He asked you out?"

"_That's _what you focus on? I told him I was with someone."

"Well, yeah," says Will, though he sounds a little relieved. "What do you mean, he's not doing well?" She tells him what Reese said, and can hear him suck in a breath. "Shit. I should have – I should have talked to everyone, individually, I should have –"

"Stop," she says. Are they back to this, really? "How many times do I have to tell you it wasn't your fault?"

He's silent for a moment. "At least a few more," he says, quietly.

MacKenzie puts down the grocery bag on her futon. "Well, at least that was honest," she says, and closes her eyes. She doesn't know what to do for him, sometimes. It hurts.

"Sorry," he whispers.

"Don't be." She twists the plastic handles of her grocery bag in two fingers and listens to the little noises that come over the phone line.

"Maybe he'll email me," Will offers.

"Yeah," she agrees. "Maybe."

––––––––––––––

She sleeps until ten the following day and is awoken by Sloan knocking on her door. Stumbling across the room, she trips on the last still-packed box and stubs her toe, so she doesn't look up as Sloan comes in, just shuffles back to bed and pulls the covers over her head. Sloan lies down beside her, on top of the blankets.

"What do you want to do?" she asks.

"Sleep," mumbles MacKenzie.

"I brought you tea," says Sloan, and MacKenzie thrusts a hand into the open air and makes a _gimme _gesture until Sloan hands over the paper cup. MacKenzie pulls it under the covers and awkwardly takes a sip. She takes three more before she feels ready to poke her head out.

"Ugh," she says. "I hate mornings."

"Oh yeah? Maybe _they_ hate _you_."

MacKenzie glares through sleep-blurry eyes. "They do."

"Yes, well, _I _already got up and went to the gym and showered and called Will and finished unpacking and got you tea and –"

"You _do_ look unfairly peppy. And you smell good. What shampoo have you been using? Wait." MacKenzie furrows her brow, replaying what Sloan just said. "You called Will?"

Sloan takes a sip from her own paper cup. "Yes."

MacKenzie bolts into a sitting position, the tea in her cup sloshing around. "What did you say to him?"

Sloan shrugs. "Not much. He was very polite, considering I called at seven this morning."

"_Sloan_. He didn't go to sleep until three!"

"He could have gone back to bed. We didn't talk long."

"What did you talk _about_?"

"You."

"Well, I assume so."

"Hey, don't be like that. We could have discussed the economy. I bet he knows about the economy. Or he could have listened while _I _talked about the economy…"

MacKenzie holds up a hand. "Can you tell me what you talked about without making me feel like I'm pulling particularly stubborn teeth?"

"Nope, it's a sisterhood secret."

"Will is _not _a sister!"

Sloan shrugged. "I swore him into the sisterhood. So sue me." She smacks MacKenzie's shoulder. "Get up. You have to help me hang up my posters. I want to use a hammer and nails and everything because we're almost real people now. And because I'm sick of those poster-hanging adhesives falling off the wall halfway through the semester."

MacKenzie groans and flops back against the pillows.

Forty-five minutes later, she's standing on Sloan's desk chair and tilting a framed poster a little to the right.

"No, not that much," says Sloan, munching on the Oreos she took from MacKenzie's room.

MacKenzie makes the desired adjustment. "Give me one of those. I didn't eat breakfast."

Sloan hands her the package. "Well, whose fault is that?"

"Yours," says MacKenzie, digging out two cookies and handing it back. She takes a bite and chews, thinking. "Do you want to go into the city for lunch?"

"Kenzie, we literally _just _got back here. You want to leave already?" MacKenzie sends her a pleading look, and she sighs. "What does everyone else do during frosh week?"

"Drink."

"Well, yes, besides that."

"…Drink," says MacKenzie, not seeing Sloan's point. "I'd rather go to lunch and catch a Broadway matinee."

"That's going to cost about three hundred dollars. More. Plus train tickets."

"Yeah, because it's the thirty bucks for the train that kills you."

"That's ten percent," says Sloan, "which is non-trivial."

"I want to _do_ something," MacKenzie says, frustrated. "And it's so nice out." It is – warm and sunny and cloudless without being stifling. The air is dry and pleasant.

"No," Sloan says, and she's suddenly serious. "Let's be perfectly honest for a minute. You want to see Will. That's fine, Kenzie, really, but you should be honest. At least with yourself."

MacKenzie stares at the remaining Oreo in her hand. She doesn't really want it. Her shoulders fall a little. "I am," she says. "I know it. It's just… being here, it's hard. Or it's going to be hard once he gets here, too." She sighs, trying to figure out what she means. "I don't know. I just feel so…" _Lost_, she means, but she isn't sure why.

Sloan takes the Oreo from her hand. MacKenzie realizes that she's been fiddling with it and there's a small pile of black crumbs on Sloan's floor. "Sorry."

"Whatever," says Sloan. "Listen. What do you want?"

"Will."

Sloan rolls her eyes. "Yes. Thank you. I mean, what do you want _with him_."

MacKenzie draws back in confusion. "Sloan, are you trying to give me relationship advice? You know you shouldn't do that."

"Yeah, I know. I'm just clarifying. Answer the question."

What does she want? She wants the world to go away so that she can be with him, just the two of them. It's childish, she knows. And it's also not quite true, because she wants to travel with him – to Greece, maybe, because she's always wanted to see the ancient theatres, or to Italy because he's never been and she loves walking around Florence in the evening and she loves the way the paint peels from the buildings in Venice, or even on a road trip across the country, bickering in the car and stopping to take pictures of waterfalls and local diners. She wants to debate with him about the efficacy of the president's China strategy, and she wants to get a rambling house in New England with a library and an oversized fireplace and five feet of snow in the winter.

"I'm pretty sure I'm in love with him," she says.

Sloan tilts her head and doesn't respond for a moment. "That wasn't the question," she says, finally. "But I'll take it."

"How can you know for sure? If you love someone."

Sloan shrugs. "Don't ask me." She frowns, because MacKenzie is looking out the window, jaw quivering dangerously. "Aren't you happy about this? You're in love. Or you think you are."

"No, I'm happy." MacKenzie walks to the window and leans her forehead against it. Outside, kids are still moving in, carrying boxes and study pillows and beanbag chairs across the quad. Two guys are struggling to fit a sofa through one of the doorways of the building across the lawn. "It's just, I thought I'd graduate and get a job, maybe abroad, but anywhere I wanted, and I'd work long hours but it would be worth it, and then I'd be successful and get really _good_ at what I do, you know? And eventually – _eventually_ – I might meet someone and it would be great, because I'd be ready for it."

"And you're not ready for it now."

MacKenzie shakes her head. "I have my whole life ahead of me, and I want him to be a part of it, but I'm afraid that I'll… lose myself in the process. Or change my priorities in a way I don't like." She holds up a hand. "I know, it sounds selfish. Maybe I don't really love him, or I wouldn't be thinking like this."

Sloan sits on her bed. "That's ridiculous."

MacKenzie snorts and wipes at her eyes. "You're just saying that because you don't know what else to say." She's glad that she can call her out on this, that Sloan will know not to be offended. She adores Sloan.

"A little. But I mean it, too. Of _course _you're allowed to be scared about this. You're allowed to be scared about basically everything. We have to be _real people _in nine months."

"God."

"Yeah, this is what I'm saying." Sloan walks over and puts a hand on MacKenzie's shoulder. "I don't think it means that you don't love him. I think it means you're taking this seriously."

"I am."

"Okay, then." They stand there for a minute. The boys with the couch put it down, and one wipes his brow. They're blocking the entryway, and a girl is forced to clamber over the couch to get out into the quad. Sloan snorts. "Idiots. They have to stand it on its end and turn it a little. Haven't they ever moved a couch before?"

MacKenzie looks at her. "Freshmen," they say together, and MacKenzie laughs.

Sloan walks back to the bed and tosses MacKenzie the abandoned Oreo. "Come on," she says. "Call Will and let's catch a train. I want lunch."

MacKenzie beams and pulls out her phone.

––––––––––––––

"How _in the world_ did you get tickets to a Sunday matinee of The Lion King on such short notice?" MacKenzie blinks in the sudden brightness outside the theatre and tucks her arm through Will's.

He grins, looking down the street. "Magic," he says, and she slaps his arm.

"Seriously."

"Seriously," he says. She rolls her eyes, but she almost believes him.

"Yeah, all right," she says, softly. The light is behind him, shining on his hair and the edges of his shoulders, and she's just happy.

Will clears his throat and offers his other arm to Sloan, who nods and takes it. They're now blocking the entire sidewalk, but MacKenzie can't bring herself to care. They come out onto 7th, traffic brushing past and the sidewalks choked with humanity, and when Will slows in indecision, MacKenzie pulls him north, towards Central Park.

They meander for the better part of an hour, past lawns thick with couples having picnics, past carriage horses stamping their steel shoes on the pavement, stopping to watch boys sail toy boats in the pond. She thinks, incongruously, of Namibia, of the terrifying path through backyards and watchful streets to reach the Botanic Gardens, of the isolated road through the trees, Will throwing himself into the ditch and the sound of gunfire not far enough away. Her hand tightens on Will's arm, and he moves his hand to rub small, soothing circles against her back and kisses the top of her head, even though there's no way for him to know what she's thinking about. She leans into him, and he wraps an arm around her shoulder. It's awkward to walk like that, but she doesn't want him to take his arm away, so she leans up against the fence around The Great Lawn and pretends interest in watching a game of frisbee between two guys, barefoot on the grass.

Will lets her, for awhile, turning to talk softly to Sloan. He's asking about her classes, MacKenzie realizes after a little bit, genuinely curious about what she's taking and with which professors. She lets their voices soothe her and looks back at the bright lawn, the late sunlight turning the edges of the grass gold. When her cell phone rings, it takes a moment before she even hears it, and she walks away a few steps before answering it so that Sloan can continue telling Will about the two 400-level economics courses she's taking.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Mac."

MacKenzie pulls the phone away from her ear and looks at the display just to make sure before she says, "Brian?"

"Yeah. Hi."

"Hi," she says, drawing it out a little. There's a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

"I'm going to be in your neck of the woods."

"Is that so?" He's being very friendly for a guy who broke up with her the week before prom. She must have been the only one who hadn't been expecting it, because no one else looked twice when he showed up with Laura Collings and MacKenzie showed up alone.

"Yeah, I'll be in New York next Monday. That's nearby for you, right? Maybe we can hang out. You know. Catch up."

There's something in his voice that she doesn't like, and she's about to say no, but then she reconsiders. After all, she's doing well now: great life, great friends, great school, and – she looks over at Will – great boyfriend. He glances up and sees her, smiling back. Why _shouldn't_ she meet Brian? If there's a part of her that wants to lord over him how successful she's been in the last three years, she tries to ignore it. "Sure," she says. "When and where?"

When she returns to the fence, Will slings his arm around her again. "Who was on the phone?"

"An ex-boyfriend. He's going to be in New York next week, so we're meeting for lunch."

Sloan leans around Will. "Brian?"

"Yeah." Sloan's brow wrinkles, but she doesn't say anything.

"Who's Brian?" Will asks.

MacKenzie shrugs. "A guy from high school. We dated for awhile."

"How long of awhile?" Will sounds merely curious, which makes her even more defensive.

"Two years," she says. "Does it matter? Are you _worried_?" It's meaner than it should be, and when Will steps back a little in confusion, she hangs her head and grabs at his sleeve. "Wait. I'm – Sorry."

He leans back towards her and says, "That's okay," but he still looks confused. She can feel the weight of his gaze, and Sloan's, as if they are a physical thing. Photons pushing up against her. "Come on," Will says, after a second. "Let's get some dinner."

They get Peking duck, which MacKenzie loves. She loves the fact that they carve it at the table, loves the ceremony, the ritual of assembling pancake, hoisin, scallions, and duck, loves that it feels like an event of some kind of importance, loves the crunch and the delicate grease. Will, she knows, just loves watching her enjoy food so much, and his eyes flick between her face and his food for the whole meal.

By the time they finish dinner, Brian's phone call and MacKenzie's defensiveness are nearly forgotten, but as she and Will walk Sloan to Penn Station, Sloan tugs on MacKenzie's sleeve. "Can I talk to you?"

"Sure," MacKenzie says, and Will walks ahead.

"Don't."

MacKenzie feels her eyebrows draw together in bafflement. "Don't what?"

"Brian."

MacKenzie actually stops and stares at her before the jostle of people passing by shakes her into motion again. "It's just _lunch_. Did you think I'm going to run off and have an illicit affair?"

Sloan drops her voice and points at Will, who is tall enough that his blond head bobs above most of the crowd now separating them. "_He_ loves you," she says, low and intense. "However confused you are about him at the moment. I already had to knock him around on the phone this morning. Do _not _make me do the same to you."

MacKenzie's mouth thins. "I can't _believe_ you think I'd do something like that." She wants to hit Sloan across the face, or push her, or run away, away, down 7th Avenue to the tip of Manhattan and into the water. Instead, she glares, furious and cold and afraid.

"Well, hate me all you want, but you should remember that you've told me about Brian. You should remember that you spent most nights in the fall of your freshman year feeling miserable about him. And you should remember that he's a douchebag, Kenzie. He's just…"

MacKenzie nods sharply, still angry. "Yeah."

Sloan looks at her levelly for a long moment. "Okay, then."

When they catch up to Will outside of the train station, MacKenzie tucks her hand inside his. It's warm, and he squeezes her fingers as Sloan says, "See you tomorrow" and disappears.

MacKenzie lays her head against his shoulder. "Billy," she says, "take me home."

––––––––––––––

Later, she's curled up sleepily against him in bed, warm under the covers as he works on his laptop. His bedside lamp is on and her eyes are closed and the sound of his fingers hitting the keys is comforting, and it's late enough that she feels once again like the world outside their room doesn't exist. She's tired, but content to not sleep quite yet, to just lie here next to Will in their little cocoon of light.

Yawning, she murmurs, "What did Sloan say to you on the phone this morning?"

The clacking of the keyboard pauses. "I think she swore me to secrecy." MacKenzie groans and burrows her face into his side. She can feel his chuckle more than she can hear it, deep and rich. "She just said that I was allowed to date you as long as I don't steal you away from her." Will pauses again. "But she's right." He twists to face her, and she reluctantly opens an eye to look at him. "I don't want to isolate you. You should hang out with your friends and do things on campus and enjoy college. I –"

She puts a hand on his chest to stop him. "I have enjoyed college. Right now, I'm enjoying you." She smiles at him, but his return smile is still concerned. "Don't worry. Once the semester starts, I'll be back in the thick of things. I'm just not quite ready to let you go just yet." Stretching, she yawns again and settles back against him. "I love Sloan," she slurs. She's just about done for the night.

"I like her too," says Will, then hesitates. "She also said… she also said she thinks I'm good for you."

"You are."

"I think it's you who's good for me," Will says, softly.

"Maybe that, too," MacKenzie says, closing her eyes. Will rests his hand, warm and heavy, against her back, and it's so soothing, so safe, that she can't help but whisper, "I guess that's what love is like."

She's tired but she's not an idiot, so she tenses and squeezes her eyes shut in panic, but he just leans over to kiss her hair, and pulls her a little closer. "I love you too," he says. "Sleep well," and he shuts off the light.

––––––––––––––

As Will is buttoning his shirt in the morning, MacKenzie slips her arms around his waist and he hums contentedly.

"I should get going," she says. "I'll walk to the train station."

He glances out the window and shakes his head. "Take a cab. Looks like it's going to rain. My wallet's on the dresser."

She laughs, and he feels it through his back. "Don't be ridiculous. I've got it covered." When she starts to pull away, he presses her hand against his stomach to stop her.

"We should have an official meeting about your thesis soon," he says. "Tomorrow? I have to come in for a department meeting at nine anyway. Should be done by eleven." He turns awkwardly to look at her, and she kisses him.

"Sure," she says. "Sounds good."

The department meeting actually wraps up at twenty to eleven, so Will runs to the nearby café to pick up two coffees and one of the scones MacKenzie likes. She's waiting outside his office when he gets back, and he hands her a coffee cup and the pastry's brown paper bag so he can unlock the door.

"I love these scones," he hears her say as they walk in, voice already thick as she chews.

"I know." His desk is clean after a summer of disuse, and his office is stuffy. It feels like someone else's space. As MacKenzie munches and settles into a chair, he pulls his laptop out of his bag and skims through his email, grunting when he gets to one a third of the way down the page.

"What?"

"Reese," he says, reading.

"Really?" MacKenzie raises her eyebrows. "That's surprising."

"Yeah, it is." He glances up at her regretfully. "Do you mind if I set up a meeting with him for noon? I was hoping to get lunch with you, but I think –"

"Yeah, no," she says. "Of course."

Will shoots off the email and keeps his inbox up. MacKenzie has unzipped her bag and pulled out a legal pad, but is still sorting through the accumulated junk inside for a pen. He passes her one from the cup on his desk. "You haven't even had class yet. I washed your bag last week. How do you already have that much crap in it?"

She glares at him through her bangs as she uncaps the pen and scribbles on a corner of her page to get the ink flowing. "It's all important," she says. "In case I need something in an emergency."

"What kind of emergency could possibly happen here? The café closes early and you have to walk back to your dorm without a midnight snack?"

She rolls her eyes, but when he grins at her, she can't seem to stop herself from grinning back, and he thinks, _God, I love her_. And then he realizes that he can say it, so he does. "I love you," he says, and her smiles gets bigger and changes, goes soft around the corners of her eyes and shy around her mouth. "Now. Where did you want to start?"

She leans forward in the chair. "I know you're hesitant about rehashing stories that have already been done, so I'll hold off on private prisons for now. There's a place in Virginia called –" MacKenzie flips through her legal pad – "Northern Neck Regional Jail. I thought I might check there first. Look at their litigation history, budgets, that sort of thing."

Will nods, thinking. "Look into their relationship with the state government, too. See if they retain lobbyists, or…"

They talk for nearly an hour, and at 11:50, Will takes a sip of his half-finished coffee and makes a face when he finds that it's gone cold. "That's probably enough to start with," he says.

MacKenzie looks at her pages and pages of notes. "More than," she says. "I'm going to forget something."

"You can come back, then," Will says, and smirks. "Actually, we should do this every week. I've got time –" he clicks on his calendar – "on Monday?"

MacKenzie shakes her head. "I'm going to New York to have lunch with Brian, remember?"

"Right. Tuesday, then?" When she nods, Will adds it to his calendar and closes the window, noticing as he does so that Reese has replied to his email. "Reese is coming by in ten minutes."

"Good," says MacKenzie, shoving her legal pad into her bag and standing. She takes his pen, too, and he hides a smile. He'll never see that pen again. "I'll get out of here, then."

Will catches her hand as she turns, and brings it to his lips, locking eyes with her as he lets his mouth graze her knuckle. Blushing, she whispers, "Bye," and he lets her go, watching her leave.

He sorts through the rest of his emails while he waits for Reese, who shows up six minutes past the hour, looking tired and unshowered.

"Hey, Reese." Will motions towards the chair MacKenzie has recently vacated. "Have a seat."

Reese sits on the very edge of the chair, his messenger bag on his lap, knee jiggling. He looks around the office, the haphazard bookshelves and the threadbare rug, the sunlight drifting through the window to catch swirling dust motes. "Professor," he says, starting determinedly at the vicinity of Will's chin.

Will leans back and breathes out slowly, wondering how best to do this. He's glad that Reese actually emailed him, but he's never known how to deal with this crap. His personal coping mechanisms have always involved a lot of alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs, which isn't something he's about to recommend to a former student. "What's going on?"

Reese opens his mouth once or twice, gripping the arms of his chair, then thrusts himself out of it. "Nothing. This was a –" He hauls his messenger bag over his shoulder. "Forget it." Managing to throw a faked smile in Will's direction, he adds, "Sorry to waste your time," and turns to go.

"Reese," says Will, voice sharp, and Reese pauses, hand on the doorknob. "Sit your ass down." Glowering, Reese shuffles back to the chair and collapses into it. "Cut the bullshit. What happened?"

"Nothing," Reese mutters. "It was just…"

"Namibia, right?" Reese nods and Will prompts, "I went to find Mac. Tess was in charge." He motions for Reese to continue.

Reese takes a deep breath. "We left the hotel. I took McHale's – MacKenzie's bag. Gary had yours. Her duffel kept getting caught on things. I wanted to make sure the girls were okay, so I went last. We were –" he frowns, eyes unfocused – "a block or two north of the traffic circle on Independence – you know, where the street changes names." Will nods, but Reese isn't looking at him. "There was an alley, or not even. A gap between two buildings. I was walking past it when I heard shouting. There were some guys – four. Four guys. One against three. Two of them had guns, and the third had a pipe or something. It was dark, I couldn't really see. I could see the guns, though, because they were pointing them at the one guy. He was crying." Reese swallows, staring at the bag in his lap. "He looked like some kind of mid-level manager. I'm not sure. He said… something." Will can imagine. It's not hard to tell when someone is pleading, _Please don't kill me_, even when they're speaking a different language. There are some things that everyone understands. "They shot him in the head. Both of them."

Will sees a tear land on Reese's bag, and Reese swipes at his eye angrily with the heel of one palm. Will pushes his chair back and comes around the front of his desk, leaning against it and looking down at Reese.

"Listen," he says, and then stops. "You kept the girls safe. That was what you needed to do right then. You can't have – You can't be responsible for thousands of lives during a food riot. When you're a journalist, when you're in… situations, in places like that, you see a lot of…" Will sighs. This isn't helping. "I was in the Green Zone, 2004. I was tracking a story about federal contractors, the ones they'd brought in for repair and reconstruction, about a lot of the money going missing."

Reese glances up quickly, then back down. "You won a Pulitzer for that."

"Yeah," says Will, his gaze on the corner of his desk, where his fingers are fiddling with a loose splinter in the wood, working it back and forth. "But I was interviewing this American contractor. He was a young guy, maybe twenty-five. Had done two tours already and then came _back_, as a civilian. Even though he had a wife and two kids, toddlers, at home. The week before, he had carried a soldier to cover when his unit was ambushed, and he had gotten on the wrong side of a few of the local Al Qaeda guys. That's how you know you're doing something right." Will tries to smile, but he can smell the dust of Baghdad, the way it used to coat his jeans and streak his sweaty sheets at night. "We were talking, and he was halfway through a sentence when he was shot through the forehead. Sniper fire. Bullet must have come over my shoulder." He closes his eyes, but then he can see, bright on the back of his eyelids, the man's misshapen skull, half-gone, neat bullet hole in the front, the blood spreading in a puddle through the dust on the street.

He breathes and snaps his eyes back open. His throat feels dry and dusty. "When I was younger, I – Well," he says, "I've spent most of my life protecting… certain people. It took me a long time to figure out that… that I can't save everyone." His eyes sting, which is strange, because he made his peace with this a long time ago. He thought. Months of drinking scotch in his apartment when he returned, the lights of the city too bright, and the air too cool. He looks up at the lights of his office and blinks hard a few times. "I can't save everyone."

Reese is looking at him now, but says nothing, so Will goes on. "The most I can do is what I set out to do in the first place. Tell the truth. As much truth as I can. To anyone who will listen. Tell the truth, even if no one is listening at all."

He shifts against the desk. "There's so much out there that happens that we can't change. The most we can do is see it. Witness. We bear witness. We _bear_ witness. It's not something we wear lightly. It's a burden. The world is a burden. But it's our burden to bear, as best as we can." He waits until Reese looks up, tear tracks glistening down his cheeks. "Do you understand?"

Reese nods, clears his throat. "I do." His voice is thick.

Will nods and stands upright, heading back around to his chair. "You're a good guy," he says, and when Reese snorts, he frowns. "You are. Even when you're an asshole, you're a good guy." He hesitates. "MacKenzie told me she's worried about you."

Reese looks up sharply at that. "That's… nice of her."

"I just mean…" Will sighs and runs a hand through his hair. "You have people on your side, even if you don't know it. Look –" He scribbles on a post-it for a moment and hands it to Reese. "Here's my cell number, if you ever need anything."

Reese nods, fiddling with the zipper on his messenger bag, and Will gets the feeling he's working up to something. His prediction is confirmed when Reese bursts out, "I know you're dating her. MacKenzie."

Will can't breathe. His hand is halfway to his desk drawer, where he left a pack of cigarettes, and he can't move it, and he can't breathe, and he can't think, and he can't open his mouth to deny it even though he has to, he _has_ to.

"I just wanted to let you know," says Reese, "that I won't tell anyone."

"How did you find out?" Will asks through numb lips and lungs that still won't inhale, which was the dumbest thing he could possibly have said because it unconditionally confirms that he _is_, in fact, dating MacKenzie. But he needs to know, with an urgency that knocks hard against the inside of his ribcage.

Reese smiles a half-smile, but it looks genuine, and Will is relieved about that much, at least. "She told me that she's with someone, and I saw the way you two looked at each other last spring. Really," he says. "You don't have to worry about me, Professor."

Will looks at him for a long time, eventually coming to the conclusion that he really has no choice. "Call me Will," he says.

Reese nods. "Well," he says, standing, looking somewhere to the left of Will's face. "Thanks. For. You know."

"Yeah," Will says. "Sure," and when Reese leaves, he lets his forehead fall forward until it thumps hard against the desk top.

––––––––––––––

MacKenzie is doing research late that night, glasses on her nose, when Will calls. She glances at the clock in the corner of her screen: it's one-thirty in the morning. She must have lost track of time.

"Northern Neck _does _retain lobbyists," she says without preamble. "One of which is Kemper Consulting, Inc., which also represents Virginia Central Regional Jail, and has hedged its bets by donating to both Cuccinelli's and McAuliffe's campaigns. But only to the Republican House Campaign Committee."

"MacKenzie," Will says, in a broken voice.

"Will? What's wrong?" She takes her glasses off, heart hammering. He says nothing, and she can practically _hear _him struggle to express his thoughts. She tries to think of what could have worked him up. "Is it Reese?" That was over twelve hours ago, but she doesn't think he did much else today.

"I told him about something that happened in Baghdad," Will gets out. "I just needed –"

"Oh, Will."

"I just wanted to talk to you for a minute."

"Sure," says MacKenzie. "Sure, okay. I started doing some of the reading for that Law and Politics course I'm taking. Want to hear about that?"

Will sniffs. "Yeah."

"Okay, but do me a favour?" Will makes an affirmative noise. "I want you to put down your drink and have some water and get into bed, all right?"

"Mac…"

"Please."

"Okay," he whispers, and she hears a clink, the sound of his footsteps, some rustling.

Once it's died down, she leans back in her chair. "The professor assigned that book _A Civil Action_ – you know it?"

"Sure," says Will, voice raspy. "About the civil suit in Woburn. Polluted water. They made a movie with… who was it, Travolta?"

"Yeah," says MacKenzie. "I read about a hundred pages. It might be the most depressing work of non-fiction I've ever read, and I've read _Night, _and several ofPrimo Levi's books, and _We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families_. When a book about a lawsuit is more depressing than books about genocides, you know that it's bad…" She rambles for fifteen minutes, moving on from her reading assignment to the fact that her mother has been complaining about the construction a block over, to a story her father had told her the other day, keeping her voice low and soothing. She finally pauses. "Will?" she asks, and when she doesn't get a response, she knows he's fallen asleep. "I love you," she whispers, and hangs up the phone.

He calls back in the morning, ten o'clock – late for him. His voice still sounds rough. "Sorry about last night," he says.

"You don't have to apologize," she says. She's still in bed, her laptop propped on her knees. "That's what I'm here for." He says nothing. "What happened?"

He's silent for a long moment, and she's about to sigh and change the subject because sometimes she just can't get anything out of him, when he says in a tight voice, "I can't let anything bad happen to you. God, MacKenzie, I just can't."

Frowning, she leans forward. "Nothing bad is going to happen to me, Billy. I promise."

"Yeah." He clears his throat. "You said something last night about lobbyists?" he prompts, and she knows enough not to push him.

Classes start on Thursday, which means she has exactly fifty minutes of lecture before she's done for the week.

"Being a senior rocks," Sloan says at lunch. "Want to do something fun this afternoon?"

MacKenzie pops a piece of a roll into her mouth and chews, considering. "Like what?"

Sloan raises an eyebrow. "First semiformal is in two weeks."

MacKenzie grins. "Shopping it is."

They take a bus to the mall. MacKenzie isn't really looking for anything in particular, which is the most fun you can have while shopping: she finds the six most ridiculous dresses in Macy's and takes them all into the dressing room. In the next stall over, Sloan is trying on a navy one-shoulder, and when they come out at the same time, MacKenzie pouts.

"You look good in everything," she says, but Sloan is too busy laughing to answer.

"You –" she squeaks out. "That – dress."

MacKenzie does a spin. "What, this?" she says innocently, plucking at the hot pink tulle.

Sloan manages to get ahold of herself enough to get out, "The bared midriff really makes it work." She wipes her eyes.

"Well, if that's how you feel about it," MacKenzie says, and flounces back into the dressing room to try the lime-green sequinned number. When she remerges, she and Sloan examine it critically.

"Very chic," says Sloan, "very haute," and MacKenzie almost loses it.

Sloan puts the navy dress on hold and they move onto Nordstrom's shoe department. "Boots!" MacKenzie says, and ends up sitting in a chair surrounded by three and a half stacks of shoe boxes.

"So," says Sloan, in a way that makes MacKenzie suspect that this entire trip may have been intended to put her in a good mood and get her into a position where she can't just stand up and walk away. Sloan knows that she'd never leave a good shoe department before she's finished looking.

"What's happening right now?" she asks suspiciously.

"You're trying on shoes."

"Yes, I am. So let's focus –"

"Lunch with Brian on Monday."

"– on that," MacKenzie finishes, looking at her right foot. The leather boot creaks a little as she flexes her ankle. "Yes."

"I just don't want you to –"

"Oh, leave it, Sloan," MacKenzie says. "Besides –" she unzips the boot so that she doesn't have to look at Sloan – "I told Will I love him."

"You… did."

"Yeah."

"When? And why?"

"Sunday night. And –" she looks up again, so that Sloan knows she's serious – "because I do."

Sloan looks at the open box by MacKenzie's feet, which contains a beautiful pair of brown Nine Wests. Three-inch heel. "Kenzie, you broke up with Brian three times, and every time, he guilted you into getting back together."

"Yes. He even left a doughnut outside my door on a school trip because he thought it would make me guiltier. Will is a much, much better man. I'm one hundred percent with you. Which is _why I love him_. I don't understand your _point_." She opens the next box and starts pulling cardboard and tissue paper out of one boot.

Sloan automatically takes the other and does the same. "My point is that Brian has some sort of weird persuasive mind power over you. Just –" she places a hand on MacKenzie's left ankle, where it's propped on her right knee. "Be careful, is all." When MacKenzie nods, Sloan hands her the boot. "Why would a doughnut make you feel guilty?"

MacKenzie rolls her eyes. "It was a Boston creme." Sloan stares, and she sighs. "It's a long story."

"Tell me," says Sloan, so she does.

––––––––––––––

Brian looks unfairly good.

He's already ordered a coffee – _Typical_, she thinks – and is sipping it as he stares out the window. Which means, MacKenzie realizes, that he must have seen her arrive and still decided to not look at her as she walked in. Always the gentleman, Brian.

"Mac," he says warmly as she sits, and for some reason, it pisses her off.

"It's MacKenzie, please," she says.

There's a knowing smirk on his face as he says, "Sure, MacKenzie," and she wonders what he thinks he knows.

They talk until their food comes about school and their summer internships, and in spite of herself, she relaxes. Brian has always been easy to talk to; conversations with him never demand anything from her, and even his blatant arrogance is a certain kind of charm. Against her own better judgment, and the voice in her head that sounds like Sloan saying _douchebag_, she warms to him a little.

As she flakes off some of her salmon with the side of her fork, MacKenzie asks, "What brings you to New York?"

Brian shrugs. "I was in Boston over the weekend for my grandfather's birthday and decided to stop over on my way back to D.C."

MacKenzie raises an eyebrow. "Why?" He'd have had to buy two different Amtrak tickets, which was unbelievably expensive.

Brian looks at her soberly. "To see you," he says.

She snorts and spears some asparagus. "No, seriously."

"Seriously." When she glances up, he's still looking at her with a sure intensity and there's something in his face that she recognizes. She stares at her water glass so she doesn't have to see it anymore. Condensation has budded on the glass, running in fat rivulets down the side to form a little puddle around its base.

"Why?" she asks again, and it comes out much softer and more vulnerable than she'd hoped. He confuses the hell out of her.

"I miss you," he says.

She forces herself to snort again. "What, you broke up with your girlfriend last week?"

"Yes," he says, and she rolls her eyes, but he goes on. "Because I kept thinking about you."

She feels a surge of triumph at that, and even though she knows that it's beneath her, that it belongs to the 18-year-old who sat alone at prom watching him dip Laura Collings on the dance floor, she can't shake the feeling of having won. She knows he sees it, and she swallows and looks away to give herself some time to settle back into the successful young woman who has achieved academic success and survived Namibia and can claim Will as the man she loves.

"Good for you," she says. "But you missed your shot. I'm with someone now." _Someone who is ten times better than you ever were,_ she adds in her head, but she doesn't say it, because one of them, she thinks, should try not to be cruel. She refuses to think that maybe it's also because she's still trying, in some way, to win him.

She's never liked losing. That's always been the root of her success. It's also always been her biggest weakness.

Brian shrugs. "For now," he says, and she's so furious at him for saying that that the anger kills her appetite and she sets down her fork with fingers that shake as heat rises with a sick bubbling feeling through her chest and throat.

"Fuck you," she says, and tugs her bag off the corner of her chair, fumbling with her wallet for some bills to toss on the table and scraping her chair against the floor as she stands.

"Wait –" Brian half-stands. "Mac…"

"MacKenzie," she hisses, because she can hear Will in her head, the way he whispers _Mac_ like she's something precious and her name is a sacred word, but she's also hearing the way Brian said it after their fourth date, when they lay in Central Park at three in the morning and he kissed her like she could never possibly break, when his voice was rough with passion and she thought that he was everything she could want. She shakes her head, confused, trying to break away.

He knows he's gotten to her, and he's known her long enough to know why. Grabbing her arm, he smirks again, and it's equally awful and attractive. He used to lean against her locker in the morning with the same look on his face, the confidence of having what he wanted, and she recalls the elation she felt knowing that what he wanted was _her_.

He edges around the corner of the table so they're standing close to each other, so close his breath brushes her face. "Remember when I took you to Cape Cod with my family and we went fishing?" His voice is soft, and she remembers that she used to love him. She wishes she didn't. "It poured and we had to hide under that jetty for an hour." Of course she remembers: she remembers the sound of rain hitting the calm gray ocean, the cold of the water and the sea spray on her skin, the warmth of Brian's body against her, heating her through wet clothes, the way he tasted like brine and rain.

She looks away, and he tugs her chin back so she's facing him again. His eyes are dark and full. They've always been beautiful, soft, even when he was breaking up with her. That night, the whole time he was speaking to her, she had been numb, thinking, _Your eyes are so gorgeous_. Like a dog's, like a child's. Like they could never lie. He wants her back, and the triumph rushes through her again. She can't look away from his face: the lines beginning to form around his eyes, the dark stubble that has grown thicker since the last time she saw him.

He steps even closer. "I thought you were the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen," he whispers, and when he leans towards her, she doesn't pull away. His kiss is familiar, and warm, and he _wants _her, and she kisses him back for a long moment before she thinks, _Will_, and feels awful and sick. She pushes him away, hard, and stares, panting.

"I said, I'm _with_ someone," she says, but her voice is rough and shaky.

"Are you sure?" he asks, smirking, and wipes his mouth.

She grabs her purse and bursts out the door. He doesn't stop her.

––––––––––––––

She lets herself into Will's apartment. He's on the couch, working on his laptop, feet on the coffee table and Sports Center highlights turned down low. He twists to look at her as she walks in and smiles happily.

"Hey, honey. I thought you were going to go back to campus after lunch."

She nods. "I was." She wants to speak, tell him what happened, so that he can reassure her it's okay. No: she wants him just to _know, _so that she doesn't have to say it out loud. To her frustration, she feels herself begin to cry.

"MacKenzie," says Will, horrified, putting down his laptop and rushing to wrap her up in his arms. "What's wrong?"

She shakes her head and pushes him away. As much as she wants it, she doesn't think she deserves his comfort; this was entirely her fault, and she was cruel to him and he doesn't even know it. She doesn't want him to have to be holding her when she tells him.

"Brian kissed me," she says, staring at her feet, and she's close enough that she can feel him tense with anger.

"_What?_" he breathes. "Where the _fuck_ is he? I'm going to –"

"No!" says MacKenzie, putting her hand on his chest. She's sobbing, which is stupid because she has no one but herself to blame. "I _let_ him. And I even kissed him back for a few seconds." Will has gone quiet. MacKenzie feels like something is tearing inside of her. It hurts. "I'm so sorry, Will. I don't even _like _him, I just –" She turns away and covers her face with her hands. She doesn't want to see the look on his face. "God, I'm sorry."

To her surprise, after a moment, Will pulls her close again and kisses the top of her head. "Sh," he whispers, and she sobs again, in distress and relief in equal measure. "Sh, it's okay."

"No," she insists, but it comes out garbled.

Will gently tips her head back so he can see her face. "He kissed you?"

She nods. "He kept saying how he missed me and wanted me back, and I told him I was with someone and tried to leave, but he stopped me and – he just _gets _to me somehow. I don't know. He's a jerk, a complete asshole, but he knows exactly what to say to me to make me upset or confused or…"

"Manipulative bastard," mutters Will, and MacKenzie realizes that he's still angry, so angry he's practically shaking with it, but his hands on her face are gentle, and so are his lips when he presses them to her forehead. He draws her towards the couch. "Come on. I have to work, but you can just lie down for awhile." When she hesitates, he brushes her hair back from her flushed, sticky face. His hand feels cool, and she can't help but close her eyes for a moment at the sensation. "Come on, Mac."

"You're being too nice to me," she says as she lets herself be led to the couch. ESPN is showing highlights of the Steelers losing to the Vikings. Will settles himself in a corner of the couch, his laptop balanced precariously on the arm so that she can lay her head in his lap.

"Must be because I love you," he says softly, and she closes her eyes.

––––––––––––––

She takes the train back after dinner, and calls Sloan as soon as they're out from underground, speaking quietly. "You were right," she says, dully.

"About Brian?"

"Yeah."

Sloan pauses. "I wish I hadn't been. What happened?" MacKenzie tells her, and Sloan asks, "How did Will take it?"

MacKenzie smiles. "Really well, actually. I didn't tell him all the details," she thinks of Brian saying _For now_ and has to pause to breathe through her anger and shame, "but I told him what happened, and he was understanding and sweet and just – wonderful."

"He's a good guy."

"Yeah," MacKenzie says, softly. "The best."

"You're on your way home?"

"On the train."

"I'll meet you at the station."

"You don't have to do –" she starts, but Sloan has already hung up, and MacKenzie spends the rest of the train ride feeling incredibly grateful for the people who love her.

The next day, she meets with Will again about her thesis. It takes twice as long as it should every time she flips through her notes, because she can't manage to look down at the legal pad and away from his face, away from the soft-eyed, tender look he's giving her.

"Um," she says, pages crinkling under her fingers. "Northern Neck gets about three-quarters of its funding from federal sources."

"Any lawsuits?"

"Yeah. Nothing unusual – most were immediately dismissed. One guy who was shoved against a wall and broke his wrist didn't get an x-ray for nine days, and never got a cast on it. Another had a heart attack and didn't see the inside of a hospital for three days. He was –" MacKenzie searches through her notes, trying to find the quote – "chained to the bed, and brought back each night because the jail didn't want to incur the cost of an officer to guard him." Looking up, she adds, "But that's the worst of it. Pretty awful, but nothing out of the ordinary, really. Food code violations, things like that. Did you know that the incidence of diabetes in the prison population is 11.1%? That's nearly 5% higher than in the general population."

"I didn't," says Will. "What about the political angle – voting populations?"

"It's in Richmond County. Before the jail was built, the county had a population of about 7200. Now it's 9000."

"That's a –" Will pauses, staring over her shoulder as he does the math – "twenty-five percent increase. Exactly." He whistles low. "Good work. What else?"

"Nothing yet. I'm still working a few angles on Northern Neck, then I'll go broader and examine the program as a whole. I've got a list of things to look at here…" As she finds the page, Will comes around the desk and behind her chair to look over her shoulder, leaning in so close that she can feel his heat, smell the faint, rough aroma of cigarettes and the clean scent of his soap. She tries to refocus. "GAO audits, the Marshals Service…" Will _hmm_s, pressing his cheek against hers, and she completely loses the thread of her thought. She can feel him smile, and then he starts pressing hot, open-mouthed kisses against her neck. She grips the arms of her chair tightly, shivers shooting down her spine and heat rushing through her.

"Will," she means to say in warning, but it comes out more as a moan.

"Hm?" he says, without taking his lips off her skin.

"You should stop," she says, but it sounds unconvincing even to her, and when he takes her earlobe between his teeth, she groans.

"Shh," he says, wickedly. "You have to be very quiet."

MacKenzie shifts uncomfortably. "I don't want us to – Will…"

He leans back to look at her for a moment, then walks to the door, locks it, and turns off the lights. "Better?" he asks as he comes back, and she exhales and nods. "Good," he says, and lifts the legal pad out of her grip, plucking the pen from her fingers and laying them both on the chair beside her. With equal calm, he makes a neat stack of the papers beginning to accumulate on his desk and sets it on his office chair. MacKenzie can only watch. She thinks her brain is melting. The light from the window is dusky and thick with the blinds drawn, spots of sun making their way through to spangle Will's button-up and dazzle her eyes when she moves one way or another. Will slips one arm around her back and another beneath her legs, lifting her and turning to set her gently on his desk. Her eyes are wide and she wants, she wants, she wants. When he smiles at her, she can't help but clasp a hand to the back of his neck and draw him in, her mouth almost desperate on his.

He forces her to slow, bearing down on her mouth with infinite patience, gentle, and she gradually submits to his deliberateness. It feels like a dream: his office warm in an early autumn still as hot as summer, the spots of sunlight dancing over their bodies. Outside she can hear voices, students going by on bicycles, children out for walks with their parents through campus, and farther away, cars passing on the street. She sighs in pleasure against Will's lips as he finally deepens the kiss, as he eases her mouth open and adjusts the hand tangled in her hair to tilt her head upward. MacKenzie untucks his shirt so she can smooth her hands against the soft skin of his back, warm and flushed against her palm. She hooks a fingertip under the waistband of his jeans and follows the fabric around as far as she can, to his hips, and he gasps, removing the hand from her hair to pull at the hem of her shirt.

Since they have to separate for a moment as her blouse comes between them on its way over her head, she takes the opportunity to lean back just enough to unbutton his shirt, slowly, one excruciating button at a time. Watching her with dark eyes, Will lets her, and she eases the shirt off his shoulders and over his arms, relishing the quiet sounds it makes slipping over his skin and falling to the floor. He stands between her legs as they dangle off of the desk and takes her in his arms again, one hand splayed between her shoulder blades, his thumb swiping across the bumpy vertebrae of her neck as she sighs at the feel of his skin against hers. Everything feels so good.

They stay like that for a long, long time, just kissing each other, their shirts forgotten on the floor, until one of his hands in its explorations of her skin brushes across her breast and the sensation makes her practically twitch with pleasure. "Will," she says, wrapping her legs around him. "Please," and he flicks her bra undone, pulls it off, and mouths at her nipple. She groans, letting go of him to brace herself with her hands behind her on the desk, head thrown back. He teases the other nipple with his left hand, his right clasped around her ribcage so that she can feel each finger every time she breathes in. MacKenzie scoots forward a little so that she's flush against him, grinding into him, and they both moan, and she breaks the contact of his mouth on her by leaning forward to frantically pull at his belt, his button, his zipper, pushing down his pants and boxers in one go. Toeing off his shoes, he steps out of his clothes as he does the same for her. She leans back on her hands so that he can peel her jeans off of her hips, and he reaches down with two fingers to tease at her.

"Please," she begs, and he kisses her quiet, slipping both fingers inside of her, slick and soft and hot. Her hands are still braced on the desk, which is a waste, so she moves them to hold both sides of his face. He's looking down at what he's doing to her, and she doesn't know how many women he's done this with before but it must be at least several and still his eyes are wide and awed as he watches his fingers slide in and out of her. She cups his cheeks and says, "I love you," and his gaze flickers up to hers, but she only has a moment to enjoy it because his thumb grazes her clit and she has to close her eyes and let her head fall against his shoulder. "God, Will, I want you. Please. _Please_." She's said that a lot now, but he doesn't laugh, just kisses her neck as he removes his fingers and mouths his way to a spot just under her ear, pulling her a little closer so that he can slide into her in one long, slow motion. She muffles the sound she makes against his shoulder and his fingers tighten convulsively on her waist.

"God, Mac," he groans, and she can't help but feel a little triumphant even though she hasn't really done anything. She can feel him holding himself back, going so slowly it's driving her crazy, and she wraps her legs around him, changing the angle enough that she's panting, hips twitching forward to meet him on each thrust, hands behind her on the desk again, a little slick with sweat on the polished wood. He thumbs circles at her clit again, and she's so close. "Will, Will," she says, and comes, forcing herself to be quiet. He gathers her up, and in another moment or two he's coming as well, pressing his face into the niche between her neck and shoulder as he groans.

They just rest there for several minutes, breathing into each other as they come down, until Will takes her face in his palm, leans back, smirks, and says, "Same time next week?"

And she laughs.

––––––––––––––

The semester flies by, as usual, in a rush of class and reading and Will and late nights working on assignments and Will and thesis research and Will. They meet officially every week, and even though they see each other most other nights, too, half the time those meetings end with them locking the door to his office and turning off the lights. Sometimes they just make out, the radiator humming beneath the window, and MacKenzie loves it, and loves him, and she even loves working on her thesis with him. She's the only senior who isn't complaining about thesis work, and whenever she's sitting in the dining hall listening to their whining, she has to work hard not to smile, remember to nod sympathetically.

It isn't just Will that makes it enjoyable: she feels like she's teetering on the edge of something with this story, like she's doing something real.

"There are two programs that allow the Marshals Service to contract out regional facilities," she tells him. "IGAs – that's inter-governmental agreements, between the Marshals and state and local governments, for a per-diem rate – and the CAP program, where there's a per diem rate _and _the Marshals help pay for construction and renovation. That's how Northern Neck is contracted."

"Who oversees the CAP program?" Will asks, leaning forward and tapping a pen against his desk.

"I don't know."

Will raises his eyebrows. "Find out," he suggests.

She calls the Virginia Board of Corrections, which claims that they have no oversight over regional jails, suggesting that she try the Sheriff's Association; the Marshals Service eventually, after nearly two months, gets back to her, their spokeswoman saying that they don't oversee CAP jails. MacKenzie feels giddy.

"No federal oversight!" she says to Will over the phone. He's in New York and she's sprawling on her dorm bed. Her room is stuffy with the heat on, so she's cracked the window, and a draft of frigid air is whistling by her ear. "That always makes a splash."

Will huffs. "MacKenzie," he says, "remember that there are real people involved, yeah?"

She's instantly ashamed that she's let her journalistic excitement overrule her humanity. "Yeah," she says, guilty. Most of all, she _really_ doesn't want Will to be disappointed in her.

"Trust me," he says, as if he can hear her thoughts, "I get it," and she smiles in relief.

She wades through budgets and budgets and budgets and government reports and GAO audits. The OIG has audited the CAP program, including most of the regional jails involved, but not Northern Neck – it's been marked as "pending" for the "next few months," but that was in 2005 or 2006. MacKenzie sends a Freedom of Information request for the OIG's review of the jail. In early December, a week and a half before the end of the semester, she gets a letter saying, "After a thorough search, please be advised that no responsive documents were located in the OIG."

She works late on Monday night and arrives at Will's office at eleven on Tuesday still bleary-eyed, slumping into her chair. "What's next?" she asked. "I'm a little stuck."

Will frowns, as he always does when thinking how to approach something. "You should visit Northern Neck," he says. "These long stories, investigative pieces, they're always better the more details you have. If you can describe the place –"

"Brilliant!" she says, sitting upright quickly enough that some of the coffee she's holding sloshes through the opening in the plastic lid, scalding her fingers. She winces, transfers the cup to her other hand, and gently sucks the coffee from her skin. "You think I can get in?"

"Sure," says Will. "Call them."

"I can do it now?" she suggests.

"Go for it." He watches her with amusement as she eagerly pulls out her laptop and finds their number, dialling and waiting with ill-disguised impatience for the answer.

It's a frustrating call, but the first time she gets stonewalled, she puts the phone on speaker so that Will can hear, and he comes over to whisper suggestions in her ear. She even has to use his name three times, but twenty minutes later, she's been given permission to get a tour of the facility that weekend, and she's practically giddy. Will heads back around his desk to his laptop, punching in the address on Google Maps.

"It's nearly a five-hour drive," he says. "What time on Saturday?"

"One-thirty. I'll be okay driving," she reassures him. "I just need to borrow a car."

"You could have mine," Will says, "but it will be in New York. I have a meeting with my book agent on Saturday morning. I'm sorry." He looks troubled. "I'm also not crazy about you driving five hours each direction in one day. Especially in December."

"Don't be ridiculous," she says. "And I'll find a car, don't worry about it."

"Let's meet on Friday before you go, then," Will says. "Go over what you're looking for. Keep in mind that you won't be able to bring much in. They usually don't allow cell phones, or even watches. You'll need to take notes by hand. If they even let you have a pencil."

"Sounds good. Worst case, I have a great memory." Grinning, she pops out of her chair and leans over his desk to kiss him goodbye when her phone rings. She glances at the display and feels her stomach churn. She sets her coffee down. "It's Brian."

Will looks at her. "Do you want to answer it?"

She shakes her head. "No." She sighs. "Yes. I want to know what he wants."

Will nods, gently wraps his hand around her wrist because her palm is pressed flat against his desk. "Go ahead."

Taking a deep breath, she answers the phone. "Hello?"

"Mac," Brian says, and she curls her fingers around Will's.

"It's _MacKenzie_," she hisses. "What do you want?"

"I want to see you again."

"Tough luck."

"I'm in the area."

"Did you think that would convince me? Even if I _wanted _to see you, which, let's be absolutely clear, _I do not_, I'm too busy to come to New York –"

"No," says Brian. "I'm at the train station on campus."

"_What?_" MacKenzie notices that she's gripping Will's hand so tightly that both their knuckles are white, but she can't seem to let go. "Why?"

"To see you."

"Get back on the train and go home," she says, and glances up to see Will mouth at her, _He's here?_ She nods and lets go of his fingers to cover her phone with a palm. "At the train station," she whispers.

Will tilts his head for a minute and then, surprisingly, grins. "Let's go meet him," he says.

She grins back for a delirious moment, and then feels her heart sink and shakes her head. "We can't," she said, "we can't let him know that you and I…" Will's shoulders slump. "I'm sorry," she says, helplessly.

"No, you're right," he says. She realizes that Brian is talking in her ear.

"Shut up," she says into the phone. "I'm not going to see you. We're not going to get back together. I'm _done _with you."

"It's really cold on this platform." His voice is tinny through the line. "You won't just have coffee with me?"

"You really can't take no for an answer, can you?" she asks, but her eyes are on Will, who looks sad and defeated.

"Maybe you should go meet him," Will says, and MacKenzie covers her phone again.

"_What?_ Are you insane?"

Will looks at her sadly. "I love you, MacKenzie. So much. But you shouldn't have to – sneak around, and…"

She hangs up the phone without looking at it. "Where the fuck is this coming from?"

"I need you to be happy. You shouldn't have to hide. Maybe you should meet Brian."

MacKenzie crosses her arms. "Oh, and you think meeting Brian will make me happy, do you? You've made the executive decision, that in your infinite wisdom you know _exactly _what I want –"

"I'm just saying," Will talks over her, and she has just enough time to think that this is getting out of hand incredibly quickly, "that maybe _I'm_ not what's best for you."

"And how, pray tell, would you _possibly_ know that?"

"I'm old!" he says, which pisses her off more than anything else he's said so far. "And maybe I'm taking advantage of you, or isolating you, and you should –"

"Don't tell me what I _should _or _shouldn't _do, you smug, heavy-handed –"

"– you should maybe just fucking_ consider _rethinking your –"

"I'm an _adult_!" she yells. "I make my _own_ decisions, and I don't appreciate you trying to protect me as if I need it."

"You're the one who dated him in the first place."

MacKenzie steps back, surprised at the new direction he's taking. "Is that what this is about? You're _jealous_?"

"I'm not jealous, I'm just looking out –"

"For my best interests? Yeah, right," she says. "And I don't need _you_ looking out for me, thanks. What makes you think I should get back with _Brian_? What makes you think that I'm secretly regretting my decision to be with you? What the fuck –"

"You _kissed_ him," Will roars, and she can see the betrayal in his eyes that he never let her see before. If she weren't so incredibly angry with him, she might feel guilt or pity, but as it is, she wants him, just a little, to hurt as much as he's just hurt her.

"Will, fuck you." He's out of words for the moment, so she barrels right on, holding up a hand that's shaking with rage. "You know what? Brian was an asshole, but at least he was never condescending. At least he never treated me like I was weak. At least he respected me _that _much."

That's way, way over the line and they both know it, but she can't bring herself to care. Sending him a disappointed, angry glare, she snags her backpack from the ground and walks out.

––––––––––––––

They don't speak for the rest of the week. MacKenzie cries herself to sleep that night, trying not to think of Will alone in his apartment because she loves him even though she doesn't think anyone has hurt her more than he just did in the space of five minutes.

Sloan is sympathetic but refuses to take sides.

"You're _my_ best friend," MacKenzie tells her. "And he was _awful_, Sloan."

She shrugs. They're at dinner on Wednesday night, but MacKenzie is just pushing her food around her plate while Sloan shovels down dining hall rice pilaf with her usual enthusiasm. "Yeah," she says, and then swallows. "But so were you. You goaded him into it."

"I did not. I just called him out!"

Sloan looks at her disbelievingly. "You and I and God and everyone else knows that Will is the most protective, old-fashioned modern man the world has ever seen, with a completely incomprehensible guilt complex the size of Australia. You rejected every possible way he tries to relate to you and the world. And _then_ you accused him of being jealous. What did you expect to happen?"

MacKenzie stares at her, her mouth slightly open as Sloan attacks her pork chop with a dull butter knife. "When did you start understanding people?"

Sloan shrugs. "I don't. You guys are just really easy."

If anything, the conversation makes MacKenzie feels worse, because she maybe understands what made Will say what he did, but it doesn't change the fact that he _said_ it, and she's pretty sure that he meant it.

On Friday, she walks into his office and sits across the desk from him stiffly, her back straight. He doesn't look up from his email, clearly informing her that he has more important things to do, until she clears her throat.

"They're letting me bring a pencil," she says. "So I'll have handwritten notes."

"Good," he says, all business, and something in her chest quails at his tone. This, she thinks, must be how he speaks to other people. It's not angry or mean, just efficient, which is somehow worse. He raises an eyebrow, face collected and smooth. "I take it you found a car, then."

She nods. "I asked Reese if I could borrow his. When he found out why, he insisted on coming with me."

Something drifts across his face, relief maybe, followed by something more complicated, but he stamps down on it ruthlessly. "Reese?" he asks, his voice unsure, but before she can respond, he strengthens his tone and waves a hand in dismissal, a gesture that's achingly familiar. "Fine. His decision."

Clenching her jaw in anger, she rises. "Anything else?"

"No." He looks back at his laptop.

"I'll have a report for you next week by email," she snaps. "I don't see a reason for us to meet again this semester."

He looks up at that. "No," he says. "Me neither."

She manages to keep her head high as she walks out without looking at him again.

––––––––––––––

Will is cold all Saturday morning. He wakes up shivering under his covers, his nose feeling frozen, and only manages to get up and face the frigid air of his bedroom when he'll have to skip a shower in order to make it to his meeting on time. He puts on thick socks, a t-shirt, a flannel shirt, a wool sweater, and his heaviest coat and scarf, and is still freezing for the entire trip to his agent's office. It's forty degrees outside and sunny.

He knows the weather is not his problem.

Every time he glances at his watch, his brain automatically starts calculating MacKenzie's approximate position. He stops looking at his watch.

Although he's under the impression that he's very polite and responsive in his meeting, after fifteen minutes, his agent shoves her chair back from her desk and says, "What the hell's your problem today?"

"Nothing," says Will. His face rearranges itself into a pout without his permission, and he tries to put it back into a mask of polite confusion, because he's about thirty years too old to pout.

"You're snippy and grumpy. Look, if you have some kind of _issue_ with me –"

Will holds up his hand apologetically. "It's – it's not you. I'm sorry. I apologize."

She sighs, her shoulders losing some of their defensive posture, and regards him. "Are you okay?"

"I…" says Will. "Yeah." He rubs a brow with a knuckle. "Sure." He makes eye contact with her to prove it.

"We can do this another time."

Will's incredibly tempted to say yes, but he'll be damned if MacKenzie will affect everything in his life, everything he'll ever touch. He also can imagine what will happen if he goes home right now: he'll sit around his apartment, cold and alone, and… "No, that's all right," Will says, and attempts a smile. "I'll do better, I promise. Sorry, again."

She raises her eyebrow but doesn't push it further.

When he gets home, he stares at the inside of his fridge for a long time before he closes it and makes himself canned soup instead, turning on ESPN so that he doesn't have to think, so that he can get lost in college football and forget that his apartment is quiet, forget everything.

He stays like that for hours, until his phone rings. It's 3:07.

Focused on the Oklahoma-Oklahoma State game, he doesn't take his eyes off the screen as he answers it. Oklahoma is on a third and four, with half a minute to go in the quarter, so he isn't really thinking, and just says, "Yeah."

"Professor – uh, Will? It's, it's Reese."

He frowns and mutes the game. "What's going on?" He thinks maybe that MacKenzie asked Reese to phone him in case Will wouldn't answer her calls (he'd have to think about it, he can admit to himself), but Reese's voice sounds too unsure for that, with something troubling behind it.

When he responds, "There's something going on here," Will realizes it's fear.

"What? Reese, what's happening?"

"There was a – I guess a sort of a riot?"

"_What?_"

"Not – not really a riot," Reese hastily assures him. "Just a fight in one of the group units. MacKenzie was telling me on the way down that some of them, the ones without a guard to supervise, sometimes there are fights when the food is brought in, people get beaten. I think it was like that, only a little worse than usual."

"Is MacKenzie okay? Is she there?"

"She was following them around as they brought in the food."

"She was _there_?" Will turns off the television and jumps off the couch, his heart pounding so hard he thinks it will explode his chest and spread his ribcage all over his walls and they'll have to come with a forensics team to clean up his apartment, with UV lights and plastic sheeting. He breathes, squeezes his eyes shut. "Why does this keep happening?" he whispers, but he doesn't think Reese hears him.

"She's okay," Reese says. "She called me, asked me to call you."

"She did?"

"Yeah," says Reese, a little surprised at Will's question.

"Why isn't she the one calling?"

"They're on lockdown and won't let her out, but they let her use a phone. She had to leave her cell in the car with all her personal belongings. The police are coming, eventually, to take statements, but it's low priority and there isn't much law enforcement around here. We're in the middle of nowhere. And she said that she thinks the police officers are going to question all the jail officials before they get to her."

Will breathes out slowly. "That could take hours and hours." He tries to think. "You should find yourself a motel or something. You guys shouldn't drive back so late anyway." He hesitates, wishing he didn't care, but his heart is still thudding in his chest. "You're _sure _she's okay? She's not hurt?"

"She said she wasn't," Reese says. "But –" Will's body shuts down, and his hearing goes fuzzy and dim. Reese pauses, briefly, as if unsure whether he should go on. "I think she may have been lying."

"Jesus –"

"I don't know," Reese says. "I don't know her that well. But she sounded kind of –"

"_Jesus_, Reese, you might want to fucking _lead _with that information next time," Will yells. He's tearing his living room apart trying to find his wallet, his keys, his shoes. "I'm coming. I'm coming right now," he says, and hangs up the phone, so afraid that he can't breathe, can't function. They don't have full medical facilities in regional jails this size; they don't even have nurses all the time, and _God_, he can't think, _please be okay_, he _can't _–

_Think_, he tells himself, forcing his lungs to inhale and exhale, _just_ think _for a second. _His laptop is on the coffee table and he runs to it, dropping to his knees because there isn't time to seat himself on the couch. There's a flight from Newark to Dulles in an hour and ten minutes. He can make that. Another hour-fifteen of flying time, thirty minutes to rent a car, two hours to drive to Richmond County. His thoughts are sluggish, so slow under the weight of panic. That's five hours. Google Maps says it's a five and a half hour drive. _If_ he goes the speed limit.

As if he even could.

Grabbing his car keys, he barely remembers his coat on the way out the door. If he goes 90 instead of 65 on I-95, he'll save nearly an hour, which is better than flying.

90 is about the slowest he goes.

Just over four hours later, it's dark when he pulls into the jail's parking lot and there's condensation on his windows from the cold. The temperature dropped precipitously when the sun went down, and the air feels sharp against his throat, rough with frantic breathing, as he jumps out of his sedan. Three cars over, Reese opens his door and comes out to meet him.

"You're still here?" Will asks.

"Yeah," says Reese, "of course," and Will feels a rush of affection and gratitude towards him. He hopes that some of it is evident on his face, because his words aren't working very well at the moment.

"Stay here," he says. "I think I'll have better luck getting in if it's just me." Reese nods, and Will opens his mouth to thank him, for everything – for driving with MacKenzie for five hours even though they're not really close, for calling Will, for sitting in a freezing parking lot for hours, for _everything_ – but the words get caught in his throat, so he just nods back and heads towards the jail.

It's locked, of course, and thirty seconds of hammering at the door does nothing, but he knows that no one can withstand an annoying sound for very long, so he keeps at it. After a minute and a half, a guard comes to the door and says, muffled through the glass, "We're outside of visiting hours."

"You have a journalism student in there," Will says. "MacKenzie McHale. She's been here since one-thirty."

"I'm sorry, sir," the guard says, and starts to leave.

"No!" Will yells, so loudly that the guard turns in surprise. "You have to let her out, or let me in to see her."

"We're on lockdown, sir. No one in or out. She should be able to leave in a few hours, if you'd like to wait, or I can tell her that you're here. That's the most I can do. What's your name?"

"William McAvoy. I'm her research advisor, which means that I'm responsible for her safety." It actually means nothing of the sort, but the guard doesn't know any better. Will takes a breath. "I'm also her lawyer, she's been in there for over six hours, and I swear to God that if I don't see her in the next five minutes, I will sue this facility for wrongful detainment and anything else I can make stick, and your supervisor will be incredibly unhappy." He's completely bullshitting: he has no legal standing to do what he just suggested, but he's counting on the fact that the guard doesn't know that. _Please,_ Will thinks, and doesn't finish the sentence in his head.

Sure enough, the guard hesitates and then says, "One moment," and disappears. He comes back within three minutes with another uniformed guard, this one clearly a superior.

"I can't let you in, sir," the new guard says. "It's a safety concern. You understand."

"I don't," says Will. "It's been five hours since the incident. How long do your lockdowns usually last?"

"We're waiting for the authorities."

"Fine," says Will. "I won't disturb your waiting as long as you _let me in_." He is absolutely _not_ giving up, and the guards seem to realize it, because after another five minutes of frustrating, circular arguing, they finally agree to take him to MacKenzie.

It takes an excruciatingly long time to get to her, because every single door is locked, and the guard in charge needs to swipe a key card and talk into his walkie-talkie for confirmation before any of them will open. Finally, he opens the door to a small attorney room with a metal table and two chairs bolted to the floor and nothing else, where MacKenzie is sitting with her head on the table. She looks up at the sound of the door opening, and he swears and rushes towards her.

"Will!" she cries, and stands, stumbling towards him for a step or two before he catches her and she starts to sob against his sweater – in pain or shock or relief or something else, he isn't sure.

"Sh," he soothes her, stroking the back of her head and trying to forget how her face looked, swollen and bloody and bruised. The two guards have left, closing the door behind them. "Sh, it's okay."

"You came," he hears her say, garbled in her sobs.

"Yeah," he says. "I came." He had still been angry at her as he drove here, all the long miles on I-95, still angry as he argued with the guards, still angry as they led him through the building, but it is literally impossible for him to be angry at her now. Their argument seems so incredibly stupid, so childish and small, next to the fact that she is crying against him in pain and distress, with her face bashed in. He tries to gently push her away from him, unbury her from his sweater, but she just clasps him tighter. "MacKenzie, I need to look at your face, okay?"

She gives out a little sound of misery, but lets him step back and take her face in his hands. Her lip is split, one cheekbone nearly black with bruising and swollen to twice its usual size. A little dried blood lingers just under her nose and, he now realizes, she's holding her right arm awkwardly.

"What happened?"

"I just got shoved around a little bit. They weren't trying to get me, or anything," she says. She's trying to sound reassuring but instead she just sounds terrified, and his grip tightens convulsively, quickly, until he remembers that he might hurt her and he makes his muscles relax again. "I just hit the wall and then got knocked to the floor." When he looks at her, unimpressed, she adds, "A couple of times," and gives a little huff that he thinks is supposed to be laughter. "Every time I stood up, actually. Then I tried to crawl towards the door and someone fell on me."

He's picturing it, the chaos and her utter panic, and he doesn't want to, so he asks, "Tell me what hurts."

"I think I sprained my wrist just a little when I fell the first time," she says. "I don't think it's broken."

"Okay," he says, taking the wrist in his hand. It's only a little swollen, and no one point is more tender than another, so he thinks she's right and it's just a mild sprain. But it must also be uncomfortable for her to support the weight of her hand at the moment. He holds it gently as he asks, "What else?"

"I hit the wall and the floor with my face and my head. I got a nosebleed, but not enough for it to be broken, either. It's mostly the bruising –"

"I think your cheekbone might be fractured," he says.

"Yeah," she says. "And I – I hit my head. It, it hurts."

"A lot?"

She nods, carefully, and he eases her back to the chair and lets her lay her head down again, pillowing it on her arms. "Dizzy?" he asks.

"Not too bad," she says, "not like I think you were. In Namibia."

He stands beside her and cards his fingers through her hair. "You and I should stop getting concussions, maybe," he says softly.

She gives a humourless laugh. "God, Billy, let's never leave campus again."

"Deal," he whispers, and leans down to kiss the crown of her head.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs. "I'm so sorry. I –"

He shushes her. "We'll talk later, okay? I want you just to sit and be quiet for awhile. Don't worry about it." She reaches for him, tangling her hand in his sweater and trying to pull him closer, but it's awkward with the bolted-down chair and the table in the way, so he very gently lifts her, walks them to the wall and settles down on the floor with his back against the painted cinder block so that she can snuggle into his lap. Her face is smushed into his neck, her breath damp and warm and _there_ against his skin, and he can wrap his arms around her, holding her, just holding her.

After a couple of minutes, she shifts, slurring, "Shouldn't I not fall asleep?"

He shakes his head. "Total myth."

"Really?" Her voice is small and exhausted.

"Really. Sleep, Mac. I've got you," he says, and he means it.

––––––––––––––

At 9:53, a police officer opens the door and Will rouses MacKenzie enough that she's able to give a statement. He walks her out of the jail, his arm tight around her, holding her up as she leans on him. It would be easier to just carry her, but he doesn't think she'd like being carried out in front of the guards and police officers and jail officials. She shivers when he opens the door, and he leans her against the wall like she's a baseball bat or a walking cane as he shrugs out of his coat and wraps it around her. Then he does pick her up, and heads towards the car, and she doesn't complain, just presses her face into his shoulder and whimpers a little at the motion of his footsteps.

Reese jumps out of his idling car, the windows completely fogged up, and runs to open the passenger door of Will's sedan. Will settles MacKenzie in the seat and cranks up the heat before closing the door and turning to Reese, who looks pale and tired and scared.

"Is she okay?" he asks.

"A little banged up, but she'll be fine. Listen, Reese. Thank you. Thank you –"

Reese shakes his head. "Stop. You couldn't have possibly convinced me to leave her here alone. I did what anyone would have done. What you would have done for me."

Will tries to come up with something to say, some response that will give voice to the turmoil of warm emotions swirling in the pit of his stomach and the V of his ribcage, but, once again, fails. Instead, he claps Reese on the shoulder and says, "Come on. None of us should drive home. Let's find a hotel."

There's a strip of motels about fifteen minutes away, the best of which is a Holiday Inn Express, which almost qualifies as a real hotel. Reese follows him there, and Will books two rooms and has time while the desk clerk is running his Visa to be grateful, so grateful, that Reese knows about his relationship with MacKenzie. He could have booked three rooms and let one go unused, but he's just glad that they don't have to hide anything.

He asks the front desk for toothbrushes and hands Reese his room key before he walks back out to the car, through the dark, frozen air, to wake MacKenzie again. She has just enough energy to get upstairs, leaning on him heavily in the elevator and while he unlocks the door, and stay somewhat upright while he strips off everything but her underwear. Leaving her lying in the bed, he fetches ice from the machine down the hall and returns, wrapping some in his shirt and some in hers.

"Mac," he says, brushing the hair away from her face, and she whimpers. "I know, I know, honey. We have to ice your wrist and your cheekbone, get the swelling down. Just fifteen minutes, okay?"

She doesn't accede with grace, exactly, but the sight of her cheek is scaring him, the discoloured skin stretched tight, so he just sets one icepack against her wrist and holds the other to her face.

" 'S cold," she mumbles.

"I know. We're going to take you home and bring you to the ER tomorrow."

"Don't want to."

He chuckles a little and curls his fingers around her ear. "Of course you don't. No one wants to go to the hospital."

"I want to spend all day…" she starts, but talking seems to hurt her cheek too much and she trails off.

She's asleep before the fifteen minutes are up and he watches her in the light of the bedside lamp for a very long time.

––––––––––––––

When she hasn't woken up by nine-thirty the following morning, he knocks on Reese's door and asks him to sit with her while Will finds them all breakfast. He returns just after ten with three bagels and a package of cream cheese to find MacKenzie sitting up in bed, listening intently as Reese, sitting in a chair he's pulled up to her bedside, reads The New York Times aloud from his smartphone.

"Breakfast," Will announces, taking off his coat, which has become suffused with cold in the short walk from his car to the hotel's front door. MacKenzie looks a little better, at least: the bruising in her cheek has spread but the swelling has gone down just a little, and her eyes are bright. She looks worn but convalescent. Will hands Reese a bagel and settles in beside her on the bed.

MacKenzie chews slowly, with the teeth on her uninjured side, while Will and Reese debate which route to take.

"I'm sorry you'll be driving alone," Will tells him, meaning it. "It's a long trip, and that always sucks."

Reese shrugs. "It's not a big deal, really. I've done longer drives solo."

MacKenzie rests her hand on Will's arm. "I can go with him for the first little while. I'll switch cars when we stop for lunch or a bathroom break or something."

Will regards her for a second too long, wondering if she's still angry, if she doesn't want to talk to him. _He _doesn't want to talk about Tuesday, either; he just wants everything to go back to how it was. _You're the adult_, he reminds himself, and agrees to her plan.

They're out before eleven, and drive three hours before pulling in at one of the big rest stops in Maryland. Will parks first and walks over to Reese's car to open the passenger door.

"I want a smoothie," MacKenzie says when she sees him.

"It's thirty degrees outside."

"I don't care. Smoothies are delicious at any temperature."

Will hides a smile. "That's not – I don't think that's what you meant."

"No," she frowns, "it's not. I wouldn't want a warm smoothie."

"Gross," Reese puts in as he locks the car.

Will sighs. "Okay, fine, but you need to eat at least half a sandwich, too."

MacKenzie squints at him. "Done," she says, and leads him inside.

Will gets the sandwiches and a coffee each for himself and Reese, and the exchange of food and awkwardly holding the cups while they sort themselves into their cars means that he and MacKenzie don't really look at each other until he's pulling back onto 95.

"Look," he starts, as she says, "Listen." They both laugh awkwardly and she indicates that he should talk. "I didn't mean to imply that – that you need protecting or anything. I don't think you _need _it. I just… I want that. I want you to be safe. To be happy."

MacKenzie makes a sound of complete frustration and disbelief, and snatches at his hand. "Billy, I am happy. I will only ever be happy with you. And I could never in a million years be happy with that douchebag." She brings his fingers to her lips. "I love you," she says. "Get over it. I'd rather we were found out and you had to quit your job and no one ever took me seriously again and we were forced to spend out lives hiding in some hut in Uganda than be with Brian for even half a minute."

His lips twitch. "I was thinking Angola, actually. Seaside hut." She laughs, but he still owes her an apology. Taking a deep breath, he says, "I want – I need to apologize. What I said about Brian… I'm not jealous. Really. I know you didn't mean to kiss him, or –"

She's shaking her head. "No. That was me. It was a mistake, but I made it. That was fair."

"No, it absolutely wasn't. And I'm sorry. You're right. You can make your own decisions."

She toys with his fingers, curling and uncurling them. "I like that you look out for me, Will. I just want you to know that I don't _need _you to look out for me."

He smiles wryly. "Well, if I wasn't clear on that before, I certainly am after yesterday," and when she laughs, he feels a million times lighter.

––––––––––––––

There are, thankfully, not too many people in the ER early on a Sunday evening, and they don't spend too long waiting before MacKenzie's name is called. The nurse asks her at least four times how she got injured, sending mistrustful looks at Will until he offers to leave the room.

"No," says MacKenzie, firmly, and Will shrugs.

Finally, a doctor comes in and orders some x-rays, which means that Will is waiting by himself in the exam room, reading posters about diabetes and the functioning of the digestive system until MacKenzie comes back. In the end, the doctor sends her home with some naproxen, a warning not to strain herself until her concussion symptoms abate, an ace bandage around her mildly-sprained wrist, and the diagnosis of a hairline fracture on her cheekbone which (Will breathes out a sigh of relief) will not require surgery.

Will starts the car and sits there for a moment. They're both exhausted, by the long drive and the hospital and the weekend's events. He sighs, leans back in his seat, closes his eyes for a moment. "Hungry?"

He hears her shake her head, and opens his eyes again to look at her. "No," she says, and he smiles a little.

"Me neither, but we should eat. Let's pick up some soup on the way to the hotel."

"Soup sounds good." MacKenzie leans her head against the window as he pulls out of the hospital parking lot. "I should call Sloan."

"Yeah," he says, and she digs out her phone, dialling and talking softly. He leaves her in the car as he ducks in to get the soup – they have both clam chowder and chicken noodle on special, which is perfect – and hands her the bag as he gets back in.

"She's coming by the hotel in the morning. I had to convince her not to come tonight."

"Do you have class?"

"Yeah," MacKenzie says, "but I think I have a really good excuse not to go."

"I'll write you a note, if you want," Will offers, and she grins at him with half her face. It hurts him to see the other half, still, and he pauses before he puts the car in gear. "I shouldn't have sent you by yourself."

"Will, really. What were the chances I'd be caught in a prison fight?"

"Pretty low," he admits.

"This isn't television. These things just don't happen."

"Clearly they do," says Will, angrily, shifting into reverse. MacKenzie looks at him in silence as he drives them down the street to the hotel.

After three blocks, she asks, "Why do you do this to yourself? Why does everything have to be your fault?"

"That's not…" he tries.

"There _are _forces in the world other than the great Will McAvoy."

Will shoots a glance at her, unable to tell whether she's pissed at him or concerned for him, whether she's sarcastic or not, but there are no streetlights on this stretch of road and her face is hidden in shadow. "I know that," he says.

"Then why –"

"Because I can't protect everyone, okay? I can't – I can't do it all, but I can protect _you_, I _have _to protect you, and I've failed, _twice _now, and –"

"Okay," says MacKenzie. "All right."

"– and I already told you, _nothing_ bad can happen to you. God, Mac. I couldn't –nothing…" He knows what he means to say, but he can't make himself say it, ashamed and afraid and unwilling to make himself vulnerable. But he's said plenty for her to be able to understand, so he thinks he's done enough. He's done enough.

"Billy," she says. "That's… sweet, and a little fucked-up, but you have to let yourself off the hook for things that are in no way your fault. You're just hurting yourself."

He sighs. "I know," he says, scrubbing a hand through his hair.

"But?"

"Easier said than done." He pulls into the hotel lot, parks, and then swears. "We don't have clothes or anything. We've both been wearing the same thing for two days." He wrinkles his nose. "I stink."

"I'll tell Sloan to stop by my room in the morning. I think I have some of your stuff. At least a pair of boxers, anyway, and a t-shirt."

"Perfect," says Will. "I'll drive back to New York in my underwear," and MacKenzie grins with unimpeded delight.

––––––––––––––

By Wednesday, MacKenzie's back to working on her thesis. She spends the day barely able to concentrate in class, although every classmate and most of her professors are shocked enough to spend a good five minutes asking what happened to her face. After her last class, she rushes back to her dorm, changes into sweats and a tank top, and sets herself up on her bed, surrounded by papers, notes, and her laptop. Her glasses teeter on the end of her nose, and she's gripping a pencil with her teeth as she types.

At nine, Will calls.

"You would not _believe _some of the private prison companies that the Marshals Service contracts with," she says as she picks up. "Also, I started with writing down everything I remember from this weekend – I really should have done it right away when I got back, Monday morning at the latest, I'm already forgetting details –"

"Mac, maybe you should give it a rest, just for a week. You deserve a little time off. After this weekend."

She throws down her pencil, and it bounces on a messy stack of notes. She knows he's just worried about her, but she's not a child and she's not fragile, and she's _not _just his girlfriend: she's going to be a journalist, and she'll be a goddamn good one if it literally kills her. "I'm not going to be _dissuaded _from this story, Will, just because something happened to me. This is important. How we treat the people we punish _is_ _important_. And the worst thing about all this is that we haven't even decided yet how – or _if _– we're going to punish some of them. These are prisoners who haven't been sentenced. Some of them _haven't been tried_. What does that make us, as a nation? What does that make _me_ if I stop? So, no, I appreciate your concern, but I am not going to _give it a rest_."

Will is silent for a moment, and she thinks he's a little taken aback at the ferocity of her response to what was, objectively, a pretty innocuous statement. She's about to apologize when he says, in a rough, quiet voice gravelly with emotion, "That's my girl," and she glows.

He clears his throat. "Did you remember to eat?"

Biting her lip, she says, "No."

"I'll bring something over," he says, and hangs up before she can object.

Forty minutes later, she's moved to the desk so that she can eat and work at the same time and he's sprawled all over her bed. He doesn't usually come to her dorm, but it seems like he's loath to let her out of his sight. Her curtains are drawn; he's squinting in the dim glow from her desk lamp at her beat-up copy of _To Kill a Mockingbird_.

"Did you just start in the middle of that?"

He shrugs, not looking up. "I know it pretty well. I was looking for – I was – here. _'How could they do it, how could they?'_ _'I don't know, but they did it. They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it – seems that only children weep.' _"

MacKenzie stops, one hand frozen partway through flipping a page on a legal pad, the other holding a french fry halfway to her mouth. Will doesn't look up from the book. "What else?" she whispers.

He does look up then, and stares at her for a long moment across the bed before he flips to the end, to the very last page, and reads, "_ 'Atticus, I wasn't scared.' He raised his eyebrows, and I protested:_ _'Leastways not till I started telling Mr. Tate about it. Jem wasn't scared. Asked him and he said he wasn't. Besides –_" Will hesitates, then finishes, " _'Besides, nothin's real scary except in books.'_ "

MacKenzie's gaze is locked on her notes, on her laptop, the words swimming in front of her eyes. The letters lose their meaning, their ability to stand for something, and the sentences turn into straggly dark shapes on the page. "Nothing's scary," she whispers. They had brought the food in, and there was a rush towards them and she'd been afraid, and two guys ganged up on a third – she can see his face, bloodied and mashed in and unrecognizable as a face anymore – and someone had gotten thrown into a wall, there had been blood all over the floor, so much that she'd slipped in it, viscous and thick… She swallows convulsively, and when Will touches her gently on the wrist with two fingers, she gasps. "Nothing's scary," she repeats, and her face crumples as she starts to cry.

Will draws her from the chair onto the bed and envelopes her so it's like the world outside his body doesn't even exist, like he's white noise drowning out the sound of fist hitting flesh, of broken noses grinding and the heavy fall of bodies. She breathes in deep and gives a wet laugh, trying to wipe her eyes even though her hands are sort of trapped under his arms. "I'm sorry," she says, "I don't even know why I'm crying." He presses a kiss against her temple. "I meant what I said before," she tells him, her voice a little surer. "I'm not giving up."

"I never for one second thought that you should," Will says.

He doesn't have to read the last line of the book: _He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning_. Some things, they both know, can just be assumed.

––––––––––––––

"Are you going to Nebraska for Christmas?" she asks.

It's three days before the end of the semester, and she's put off asking him for weeks now. "I… hadn't decided yet," he says. They're at the hotel. MacKenzie likes the hotel, with its fluffy duvet and its cool tiles in the bathroom and the fact that she can convince Will to order room service about a quarter of the time. It's just after dinner, and she's full and sleepy, leaning against him as he watches a hockey game. "No, no, not in front of the net!" he yells, and she hides her smile against his side.

"I mean, I understand if you want to, obviously," she says, adding tentatively, "and also if you don't." He grips her hand, and she squeezes it reassuringly. "But I thought I'd – you're welcome to come spend Christmas with my parents and I. You could, you could even come on Christmas Eve and stay the night."

Will looks at her in surprise. "How did you swing _that_?"

She smiles cheekily, in relief. "I'm very persuasive."

"Well," he says, "_I _know _that_," and tickles her a little to make her giggle until he kisses her and she's no longer laughing. "I'd love to," he says, warm and honest.

When he shows up on the 24th with two bottles of wine and a stack of wrapped presents under his arm, her father greets him by taking the wine and saying, "McAvoy, you keep getting my daughter into trouble."

Will looks unsure, guilty. "Yes, sir, I do seem to be doing that. I'm sorry."

"Jesus, McAvoy, I'm joking. Are you only going to stop apologizing when you're my son-in-law?"

MacKenzie, still making her way to the door from the couch, feels the ends of her ears heat and groans in complete mortification. But Will, rather than looking like a terrified hare in the headlights, just smiles and says, "We'll have to see, won't we?" and her father guffaws.

Later, after Will has put his presents under their tree – and seeing him there in her parents' living room, in his favourite sweater, with his Christmas presents under their tree, makes her feel warm inside in a way that she's a little afraid to examine – after dinner, after an evening spent doing the crossword and reading in front of the fireplace, after they've all gone to bed – later, MacKenzie sneaks out of her room with her blanket wrapped around her to curl up on the couch and look at the tree. It's lit up with red and blue and white and green lights, the same ornaments as always hanging on it: her grandmother's angel, the childish art projects from when she was in preschool, the glass bulbs her parents bought on their honeymoon in Venice. A lifetime of accumulated memories.

Hearing footsteps, she looks up to see Will padding towards her in a t-shirt and boxers, and she raises the corner of her blanket so that he can settle under it beside her. "Thought I heard you up," he says.

She's sleepy but almost too content, too happy to actually sleep, so she just makes a noise of acknowledgement and leans against him. They both regard the tree. "I love you," she says.

"I love you too," he says, but breathes in as if he means to go on, so she waits. "Don't be scared," he says, "but – I want to do this every year. Forever." He turns to look at her, eyes serious, reflecting the coloured lights of the tree. "For the rest of my life."

She wants to reach up and touch his face, but she can't seem to move. Instead, she says, "Nothing's scary," and adds, in her head, _not with you. Never with you_. And even though she doesn't say that part out loud, from the way his hand comes around to cup her neck, from the way he kisses her gently and tender and warm like a promise, she thinks he knows anyway.


End file.
